Building a public Shopify theme is very different from building a theme for a single client.
The expectations are higher, the risks are bigger, and the decisions you make today can affect hundreds (or thousands) of stores.
Public Shopify Themes vs Client Themes
When you build a client theme, you optimize for one store, one brand, and a specific set of requirements.
Public themes, on the other hand, are products meant to work for thousands of merchants across different industries, countries, apps, and Shopify features.
Client themes exist in a controlled environment, while public themes face the unpredictability of real-world usage.
A public theme must:
- Work with thousands of different product catalogs
- Handle extreme edge cases (huge menus, missing data, odd configurations)
- Survive partial customizations and third‑party app injections
- Stay stable across Shopify platform updates
Once a theme is live in the Shopify Theme Store:
- You must support old settings pretty much indefinitely
- You need to think about migrations if needed
- And Support becomes part of the product
Archetype Themes
Archetype Themes is a well-known Shopify theme company that builds high-quality themes.
They support over 90,000 stores and some of their popular themes include:
- Impulse
- Motion
- Prestige
- Streamline
Each theme targets a different merchant profile but shares a consistent architectural philosophy.
Our Interview with Archetype Themes
To better understand how they think about themes at this scale, we sat down with their CEO for a behind-the-scenes conversation.
Who Should (and Shouldn’t) Build a Public Shopify Theme
Public theme development makes sense if you:
- Enjoy long-term maintenance
- Think in systems, not pages
- Are comfortable saying “no” to feature requests
- Can invest months without immediate returns
You should reconsider if you:
- Prefer fast delivery and frequent rewrites
- Get frustrated by support work
- Rely heavily on custom logic per project
Public themes are slow, deliberate products, not quick wins.
Why client work ≠ product work
Client work solves one problem at a time. Product work solves patterns.
If you don’t enjoy abstracting problems and living with past decisions, public themes will feel painful rather than rewarding.
How they think about theme architecture
One of the clearest takeaways from the interview is how much effort they invest in keeping flexibility from turning into chaos.
Their goal is to give merchants enough control without making the theme unpredictable or hard to maintain.
They design systems where:
- Settings are intentional, not endless
- Sections are reusable but predictable
- Merchants can customize safely without breaking layouts
Good architecture is less about adding options and more about deciding what not to allow.
Simplicity Wins
Avoid using the latest JavaScript frameworks or complex patterns when building Shopify themes.
Instead, they rely on simple JavaScript, basic globals, and straightforward logic.
Tradeoffs they’ve learned the hard way
Building a public theme means constantly balancing these tradeoffs at scale.
- Over time, Archetype learned that every decision comes with a cost. Adding too many feature requests can hurt theme simplicity
- giving merchants unlimited freedom increases long-term support work,
- pushing innovation too fast can break backwards compatibility
Wrap up
If you’re serious about Shopify theme development, the full interview is worth watching because it explains the reasoning and tradeoffs behind decisions in more depth than writing alone can.
Highly recommended if you’re considering building a public Shopify theme.