How Ministry of Supply left headless (and saved $170k)

A behind-the-scenes look at how they rebuilt on Shopify, plus onewith’s new launch and two open roles at Platter.

Author

Cam Wind
October 23, 2025

Hey, it’s Cam from Platter 👋

The team’s been shipping like crazy lately — new stores, new features, and a few projects we’re really proud of.

In this week’s issue, I’m going behind the scenes on how Ministry of Supply moved off a headless setup, rebuilt their ‘headed’ store on Shopify, and saved over $170,000 in the process.

I’ll also share onewith’s new launch and a couple of new roles we’re hiring for.

Let’s get into it.

How Ministry of Supply built a ‘headed’ Shopify store and saved over $170k

A few years ago, “going headless” was the move for ecom brands. It promised total flexibility, faster performance, and more control than Shopify’s native themes offered at the time.

If you were running a Shopify store back then, there’s a 0% chance you didn’t get hit with a dozen “why you need to go headless” pitches.

Here’s a quick timeline of the rise and fall of headless:

  • 2019–2020: Headless really takes off. Tools like Next.js, Gatsby, Contentful, and Sanity make it easier than ever to go fully custom.

  • 2021: Every agency is pitching it. 

  • 2022–2023: Shopify launches Online Store 2.0, Hydrogen, and better CMS capabilities. Suddenly, headless feels unnecessary for most brands.

  • 2024 → today: Many brands start migrating back to standard or ‘headed’ Shopify setups, simplifying their store, cutting costs, and removing dependencies on dev agencies.

Ministry of Supply’s story follows that same arc — and it’s one a lot of teams can probably relate to.

“Custom” shouldn't have to be so complicated

Back in 2024, when we first met the Ministry of Supply team, their headless store looked great. But behind the scenes, things were… slower than they should be.

As Geraldo Aldarondo, co-founder of Ministry of Supply, put it:

“If we wanted to change a button style it would require like a month of preamble. We’d have to design it, test it, make sure it plays well with all the other third-party apps we used. And that honestly just wasn’t moving at the speed at which we needed to.”

Their CMS also made things harder than it should’ve been.

“For our side, if something was 300 by 500 pixels, it was 300 by 500 pixels. If we wanted it to shift to a different ratio, we didn’t have the flexibility to do so.”

And since they were dependent on an external dev team, costs were high.

“It was much more expensive to run the headless site just because we had a full development team that we were paying for. So when anything would break, it would be a whole thing to get it back up and running.”

Because of the setup, they operated on a quarterly launch cycle — a rhythm where new features were “saved up” and released all at once. It made it difficult to move as fast as they wanted to.

Simplifying their store without sacrificing design

Together, we rebuilt Ministry of Supply’s storefront on Shopify using Platter’s framework keeping the premium experience their customers know and love, while giving their internal team full control again.

The process was really collaborative. Their in-house design team worked side-by-side with ours to bring their existing look and feel into a cleaner, faster theme. 

“We worked with the Platter team side-by-side on the design and execution just to make sure we carried over the previous template styling,” Geraldo said. “Maybe while we were porting everything over, it was a little more high touch, but the overall goal was to make it less high touch — so our team could engage with every piece of the site.”

The goal wasn’t just moving away from headless, they wanted a new way of operating their store.

  • The Ministry team can now make content changes instantly.

  • The Platter team steps in when something gets deeply technical.

  • Ministry of Supply gets to benefit from the improvements we make for other Shopify stores.

“We went from quarterly launches to a bi-weekly cadence. Now new features don’t sit in the queue. We ship them as soon as they’re ready.”

The new setup has given the team the autonomy they so badly wanted when running their headless store.

“We could push a theme live if we want to at 12:17 p.m. on a Thursday, because we want to. That’s the flexibility we needed in our system.”

Ability to ship new features every day and save a ton of cash

The change had two big effects:

  1. Speed: The team can now experiment, iterate, and launch updates in hours instead of weeks.

  2. Cost: The switch saved over $170,000 a year in development and maintenance costs.

But more importantly, it gave the brand agility.

“The best part wasn’t launch day, it was being able to ship version 1.1 an hour later and 1.2 two hours after that.”

For a fast-moving, innovative brand like Ministry of Supply, that was by far the biggest unlock

Thinking about simplifying your setup?

Platter specializes in helping brands migrate to Shopify - saving time, money, and a ton of headaches in the process.

Two recent examples:

If you’re curious what that could look like for your brand, reply to this email or book a call with our team.

Launch of the week: onewith swimwear

onewith just launched their new Shopify store with Platter this week!

A few things we love about this build:

  • Smart image logic: Product galleries update instantly based on size variants.

  • Powerful cross-sells. “Pair with” and “More styles for you” cross-sell widgets added to their PDPs.

  • Simplified content model. Product-specific fit info, global FAQs, and really good storytelling/education.

onewith’s “see it in your size” tool

See the full store → onewithswim.com

We’re hiring!

We’re growing the Platter team.

If you (or someone you know) loves building Shopify stores that balance design and performance, we’d love to hear from you.

Apply here or email [email protected] and tell us why you’d be a great fit.