The House of Stories — Branding & E-Commerce
The House of Stories is an independent comic book store based in Cobourg, Ontario, founded in 2020.
As co-owner and the sole person responsible for brand and digital operations, the focus has been on building a retail experience that works as hard online as it does in-store.
From a clean, functional Shopify storefront to a consistent visual identity that reflects the culture and community the store serves, here are some of the work done over the recent past.
Managing a live Shopify store of 1,055+ products is less about adding items and more about keeping an ecosystem healthy.
This includes product data cleanup and spreadsheet management, Liquid code edits, metadata optimization, and ensuring the storefront remains organized, and searchable.At its peak, the store has moved approximately 1000 units per month, generating roughly $2,500 in monthly sales.
Developed a seasonal style guide for The House of Stories' Mother's Day 2026 campaign, establishing the visual direction for that period across all store touchpoints.
Beyond the campaign itself, this project marks the launch of the THOS Customer ID Card program: a scannable, personalized card that identifies customer types such as VIPs, student discount holders, veterans, and other store engagement tiers.
Mother's Day 2026 is the flagship design. Customers who register during the campaign window receive a complimentary card in that season's design.
Future seasonal and event-specific designs will be released on an ongoing basis, but will be limited and will not be re-printed after that specific timeline, making each card a unique & collectible snapshot of the store's creative history.
This project represents both a branding exercise and an operational tool: connecting visual identity directly to customer data and in-store experience.
With a catalogue of over 1,000 SKUs, clean data is the backbone of everything.
Managed large-scale product spreadsheets for bulk imports, metadata tagging, and inventory accuracy — ensuring the backend reflects what's on the shelf and what customers can actually find online.
Comic book retail demands a deeper level of organization than most stores. Batman alone spans dozens of universes, timelines, and continuities — without precise series tagging, issue numbering, and format classification, a customer has no way of knowing what they're buying or where to start. This becomes even more critical for pre-orders, where customers commit to a product months before it ships.
Good metadata turns a flat product list into a navigable storefront. It's a challenge the industry hasn't fully solved — The House of Stories is working to change that.
