Schnerds. A store where you don't buy a toy, you adopt a feeling.
I found an indie plush brand I loved and, with no brief and no invoice, built the store I thought it deserved. A Toy Fair 2026 award winner is now making it their own.
at launch
each with their own page
brand behind the plush
template underneath
A Toy Fair winner, on a starter template.
Schnerds is a Brooklyn plush brand built around five characters, each carrying a feeling: Darlene the overthinker, Hobart the trash-can dreamer, Juniper the submarine fish figuring out where she belongs, JimBob the two-creature talker, and Love Yourself, hugging itself in a heart. Born on a 114-foot mural in Belgrade in 2023, and a Toy Fair 2026 award winner.
I came across the brand through a friend, and five minutes in I knew what I wanted to build: not a template with the logo swapped in, but a storefront that sounds like the brand all the way down to the checkout. What I found was a capable, functional Shopify default, set up to sell but not yet built to introduce five characters this specific. That gap is the whole reason I built.
Drag to compare the original store with the rebuild.
What the original store didn't yet have:
- A sitewide default font, not yet carrying any of the brand's voice
- A hero built for a generic product page, not five characters with five different personalities
- The characters shown as flat icons, not the plush someone would actually hold
- No way to shop by feeling, browse by mood, or meet anyone before buying
A brand this alive deserved a store that felt alive. That gap is the whole reason I built.
The store doesn't sort by product. It sorts by feeling.
I gave myself one constraint: every page introduces a character before it sells one. So the whole build organizes around emotion, not category. Each character is a feeling, each gets their own color world, and the quiz, the filter, and the product copy all point back to the same question: which part of you needs this?
Best for overthinkers
Best for life transitions
Best for deep feelers
Best for big personalities
Shown here: the four adoptable plush the shop-by-feeling filter sorts. Love Yourself and the newer characters live on their own character pages, further down this page.
Three pieces that carry the idea.
Thirteen custom sections at launch. Here's the storefront, then the three artifacts that put the "shop by feeling" idea into practice.
The current storefront, top to bottom. Scroll to explore it.
You meet the characters before you meet a price.
The homepage introduces the herd before it sells anything. Each Schnerd gets their own brand color and their own reason to exist. The twist: a "Choose by feeling" filter, so a visitor can pick the mood and let the herd sort to who fits it.
- Character cards, each in its own color world with a "best for" match line
- "Choose by feeling" filter that sorts the herd by mood, not category
- The brand film front and center, playing the story before the shelf
You don't buy a toy. You adopt a feeling.
The product language is the whole idea. You adopt a Schnerd, it ships with a Certificate of Adoption, and it goes into your Adoption Bag, not a cart. Every card leads with the feeling before the price, with verified-adopter ratings and a 30-day guarantee right where the doubt would be.
- Emotional-first product cards: the feeling leads, the price follows
- Certificate of Adoption and 30-day guarantee built into the offer
- Custom "Adoption Bag" cart in place of a stock Shopify cart
Find the Schnerd that gets you
A quiz that turns browsing into being seen.
Not everyone knows which Schnerd is theirs, so the store asks. This is the store's real quiz, running live, right down to the card, the pink progress bar, and the emoji-led answers.
- Five-question flow with a progress bar and emoji-led answers
- Result maps a feeling to a character and drops them straight into shopping
- Built as its own custom theme section, not a bolt-on app
Juniper's Social Thermometer.
The film that plays on the homepage. Juniper arrives somewhere new, invents a device that measures how warm or cold a social situation feels, and uses it to find her people, an animated cartoon edit built shot by shot to match the brand's playful, big-feelings voice.
I built it on spec. They kept it.
I started with no engagement and no guarantee anyone would pay for it. The founder saw the build and decided it should be the brand's real store. It's now live at schnerds.com: a complete custom storefront, thirteen sections, a shop-by-feeling system, a match-me quiz, an Adoption Bag cart, and a brand film set as the hero. A self-initiated concept that became a paid, ongoing engagement.
The brand got a storefront built around one idea, that you adopt a feeling, not a toy. I got the way I want to work: find a brand I believe in, and let the work make the case for me.
Want a store that sells the feeling, not just the SKU?
Book a 30-minute call and I'll tell you what's working, what's missing, and what would actually move the needle. Not ready to talk yet? Start with a free site audit.
Independent. NYC-based. Plush brands, candles, ceramics, apparel, anything tactile and story-driven.
The store shipped. I kept building.
A signed engagement isn't a finish line. The character-page system has since grown from five to eight: Aarg in his polluted canal, Rramon in the burger kitchen that got away from him, and Nelly on the moon. Here's the shorter version of everything that's shipped since.
A whole world for the herd to live in.
Meet the Herd gives each character a real home: a hub page and a dedicated profile per character, with room-scene art, a voice clip, and a bio pulled from the brand's own writer's bible. I designed and built every page myself, prop by prop, including Aarg's canal scene when he shipped as the sixth character.
Songs from the Schnerdiverse
A free coloring page, and a real reason to hand over an email.
Every character page has a printable coloring sheet. It's free, but not just a download link: hand over an email first through a real Shopify customer form, and the file lands automatically. It's an easy yes that also creates an opportunity to grow the brand's real customer list.
Small playable experiments, pitched as an extension.
Eight small browser games, one per character plus a couple standalone experiments, each turning a feeling into something you play instead of just read. Three below, the rest at the hub.
