My School Spirit Shop.

A North Texas spirit wear shop needed an online store as organized as their product line — 28 schools, dozens of styles, and a core customer who's ordering on mobile, usually mid-game. The goals were clear: every school easy to find, custom orders impossible to miss, and a back-office that handles itself after launch.

The build had to be fast, clean, and built to grow — new schools added easily, collections auto-organized, and the whole thing running without constant maintenance.

The store was built from scratch — no templates carried over, no legacy decisions inherited. Every architectural choice was made with the actual customer in mind: mobile-first navigation, a clean school-browsing experience, and a custom orders page that actually converts.

The entire store was built via the Shopify Admin GraphQL API. No clicking through the theme editor, no manual collection setup, no one-at-a-time product tagging. Everything was scripted, versioned, and repeatable.

This is what separates a Prosper Donkey build from someone spending an afternoon in the Shopify theme editor. Every part of this store was built programmatically via the Shopify Admin GraphQL API:

• Theme files written and versioned in code — 40 draft iterations, each verified before the next was cut
• All 28 collections created, configured, and assigned custom templates via API — in minutes, not hours
• School logos sourced, batch-processed (EPS → PNG via Ghostscript, PDF → PNG via sips), and uploaded to Shopify's CDN via a staged upload pipeline
• Safe deployment: always build on a draft theme, publish when ready — the live store is never touched directly

Time from kickoff to v1 live: one evening.

Once the store is live, the back-office runs on Autopilot — Prosper Donkey's daily automation layer built on top of Shopify's API. The workflow is simple for the shop owner: drop a product image into a shared folder. That's it.

Autopilot scans for new images every day. When it finds one, it creates a draft product — title, description, tags, collection assignment — and queues it for the owner to review. One click to publish. No data entry, no theme editor, no Shopify admin rabbit holes. The owner stays focused on sourcing products and serving customers.

Autopilot connects via a custom app installed before store transfer, so automation is live and authorized from day one.