Some projects are technically interesting. Some are emotionally resonant. And some — if you’re lucky — are both. Fabco Shoes is one of those projects.
A family-owned footwear business founded in New York in 1953, Fabco has spent over seven decades building something rare: genuine community trust, a loyal customer base, and a retail footprint of more than 30 physical locations.
When they came to us, Fabco had just launched their first online store — but the excitement of going digital quickly ran into a hard operational reality. Their custom ERP, POS system, Google Merchant Center, and website were all running in isolation, with no central ecosystem connecting them. Inventory was managed manually across systems. Keeping everything in sync across 30+ locations was becoming a full-time problem in itself. Fabco Shoes made the call: migrate to Shopify Plus with POS Pro, build the right infrastructure from the ground up, and start fresh — the right way.
What followed was six months of some of the technically complex, creatively rewarding work our team has done. A full migration to Shopify Plus. A custom-built ERP connector. A complete redesign of the digital experience. And a marketing engine that started delivering results from day one.
Here’s how we did it.
Project at a Glance
Client: Fabco Shoes
Industry: Footwear Retail
Founded: 1953, New York City
Retail Footprint: 30+ physical locations
Timeline: 6 months
Services Delivered: Shopify Plus Development, Custom ERP Integration, POS Migration, UX/UI Redesign, Content Strategy, SEO, Spanish Localization, Klaviyo Email & SMS, Google Ads, ADA Compliance, Performance Optimization
Accessibility Score: 100/100 — zero errors
Performance: Mobile & Desktop Core Web Vitals — passed
The Brand Behind the Project
To understand the scope of what we built, you first need to understand who Fabco Shoes is.
Founded in New York City over 70 years ago, Fabco is a family business in the truest sense — built on relationships, shaped by generations, and grown through genuine care for its customers. Today, with more than 30 stores across the country, the brand serves a wide and diverse audience: families, first-time shoe buyers, and loyal repeat customers who’ve been shopping with Fabco for decades.
That scale and that history came with real operational complexity. Fabco runs a fully custom, in-house ERP system that manages everything — product data, inventory levels, point-of-sale transactions, cash flows — across every single location. This wasn’t a brand with a simple catalog and a straightforward back office. This was a living, breathing retail operation with deeply embedded processes that their team knew and relied on every day.
Any partner taking this on needed to respect that complexity — and build around it, not against it. That’s exactly what we did.
What We Built
A Shopify Plus Store Designed to Convert
The new Fabco store wasn’t a reskin — it was a ground-up rethink of how the brand shows up online.
We started with the visual identity. Fabco’s signature color is red — bold, recognizable, and deeply tied to who they are. But we knew that such brand color used at full saturation across an entire storefront can work against you. So we built a new digital style guide that pairs the classic Fabco red with a calm, authoritative dark navy — using red precisely where it counts: calls to action, sale signals, key accents. The result is a store that feels premium and trustworthy without losing an ounce of brand character.
Navigation was completely rebuilt. We reorganized the menu so customers can shop intuitively by gender, age group, occasion or budget. When you make it easy to browse, you make it easy to buy.
Product detail pages received a full overhaul, powered by a rich metafield-based product structure. This unlocked detailed, accurate filtering and gave the team a scalable way to surface the product information customers actually need to make a confident purchase decision online. We went one step further on sizing: we converted Fabco’s fit data into a custom visual infographic that sits alongside the traditional size chart. For a footwear brand, helping a customer understand fit without physically trying on the shoe is one of the highest-value things you can do for conversion.
We also built out sale-specific landing pages, cleaner collection structures, and SEO foundations embedded at the page level — every surface of the store was built with discoverability and conversion in mind.
The Custom ERP Connector: Where the Real Engineering Happened
This was the most technically significant piece of the project.
Fabco’s ERP is proprietary, built entirely in-house, and is the operational backbone of the entire business. It governs inventory, products, POS transactions, and financial data across all 30+ locations. No off-the-shelf integration exists for a system like this. So we built one from scratch.
We engineered a fully custom ECX (E-Commerce Exchange) connector that runs daily synchronization between Shopify Plus and Fabco’s ERP — bidirectionally. Products and inventory flow in. Orders, transactions, and cash flow data flow back out. POS-specific products for physical locations are handled separately from the online catalog, with the logic built in to know the difference.
The part we’re especially proud of: we built this connector to mirror the workflows that Fabco’s team already knew and relied on every day. Operational continuity during a transition of this scale isn’t just a technical requirement — it’s a people requirement. When a team of this size moves to a new system, familiarity is everything. Our connector slotted into their existing processes so the transition felt like an upgrade, not a disruption.
POS Migration Across 30+ Locations
Migrating a point-of-sale system isn’t like flipping a switch. At Fabco’s scale — over 30 active retail locations — it’s a coordinated effort that touches staff workflows, inventory data, and transaction history across the entire business at once.
We managed this rollout as an integrated part of the broader project timeline, making sure the Shopify Plus launch and the POS migration happened in sync. Inventory stayed accurate. Day-to-day operations didn’t skip a beat. The stores kept running while the platform underneath them was replaced.
Content Strategy: Telling a 70-Year Story to a National Audience
Fabco’s brand story is genuinely compelling — but almost none of it existed online. For a customer walking into a New York store, the heritage is felt in everything around them. For someone discovering Fabco for the first time through a search result, that context was invisible.
We built a content strategy that changed that. SEO-optimized product descriptions that communicate value and quality, not just specs. Category pages that guide and educate. An About Us that turns seven decades of family history into a trust signal. Visual content and copy that make a first-time visitor feel like they already know who Fabco is — and why they should buy from them.
We also localized the entire store into Spanish. Fabco serves a significantly Spanish-speaking customer base across its markets, and a translated store isn’t just a nice gesture — it’s a meaningful signal of respect to a customer who has always been part of the Fabco community.
Marketing Activation: Built to Perform from Launch Day
We activated Fabco’s full marketing stack in parallel with the store launch. Because a beautifully built store with no traffic is just a very elegant dead end.
Organic Search & Google Merchant Center: The SEO work we embedded across the store — product descriptions, category pages, metadata architecture, and Google Merchant Center setup — produced organic traffic from Google almost immediately after launch. In a market as competitive as footwear retail, that kind of early signal is exceptional. It’s what happens when SEO is treated as a structural decision, not an afterthought.
Klaviyo Email & SMS: We built Fabco’s entire Klaviyo automation stack from scratch: a welcome series, birthday flows, loyalty reward triggers, re-engagement campaigns for lapsed customers, and SMS sequences that complement email without competing with it. Customer response was strong immediately — these weren’t generic automations. They were flows built around how Fabco’s customers actually shop, what they respond to, and when they need a nudge back.
Google Ads: Performance campaigns targeting high-intent footwear searches, structured to take full advantage of the conversion-optimized landing pages and PDPs we’d built into the store.
Social Media Advertising: Brand awareness and retargeting campaigns built to extend Fabco’s reach beyond its existing customer base — introducing the brand to new audiences across the country who had never visited a physical location.
ADA Compliance & Performance: Built for Everyone, Built to Last
Fabco serves a wide demographic — families, seniors, kids — across a large and diverse geographic footprint. Accessibility isn’t a legal checkbox for a brand like this. It’s a commitment to every customer who arrives at the site, regardless of ability.
We built the Fabco store to meet full ADA compliance standards. In addition, we’ve installed the AccessiBe widget to ensure that the website is fully usable by everyone. An audit returned a perfect 100/100 score with zero errors.
On performance: both mobile and desktop Core Web Vitals passed Lighthouse benchmarks. At the scale Fabco operates, with customers across dozens of markets and a large share browsing on mobile, speed isn’t a feature. It’s a baseline.
The Results
Six months. One of the most exciting retail transformation projects we’ve taken on. Here’s what it added up to:
- Full migration to Shopify Plus, including coordinated POS transition across 30+ retail locations
- Custom ERP connector built from scratch — daily bidirectional sync of products, inventory, orders, transactions, and cash flows across the entire retail network
- New digital brand identity — navy and red style guide, redesigned imagery, new visual direction
- Rebuilt navigation organized by gender, age, and budget — making discovery natural for every type of shopper
- Metafield-based product structure powering advanced filtering, richer PDPs, and a custom fit infographic
- Full content strategy: SEO copy, category pages, product descriptions, About Us, and full Spanish localization
- Organic traffic from Google arriving immediately post-launch — a direct result of pre-launch SEO and Merchant Center groundwork
- Klaviyo flows live from day one: welcome, birthday, loyalty rewards, re-engagement, and SMS — all generating strong early engagement
- Google Ads and social media campaigns activated at launch
- ADA compliance: 100/100 accessibility score, zero errors
- Mobile and desktop Core Web Vitals: passed
But the result we’re most proud of isn’t on this list. It’s the fact that Fabco’s team came out of this migration with a system that felt like theirs from day one. That’s not a given on a project of this complexity. It’s something you have to design for. And we did.
What Fabco Shoes Had to Say
“We began working with Omnycode for marketing support and when we decided to move to Shopify, it was obvious that they were the best team to help us do so. We had a hard time launching on BigCommerce previously, so we were hesitant about the process.
Omnycode addressed all of our needs and executed a flawless migration in record timing. Omnycode and each of their team members have been respectful, listened to our needs, and given valuable feedback. Highly recommend their team. Sofiia, Vlad and Michael are a pleasure to work with.”
- Clare W., Fabco Shoes