In a follow-up message after launching their new store on Maximize Theme, Luis of Tiendas MD reflected on the experience:
“You have a fantastic product, but it’s your world-class team that truly makes the difference. We are proud to bring our 48-year legacy into the future with Omni Themes.”
What makes the collaboration between Tiendas MD and the Omni Themes team so wholesome? Let’s find out in today’s story:
Based in El Salvador, Tiendas MD – a brand that has been open since 1978 – carries women’s, men’s, and children’s footwear, including its own MD label and an official Puma collection. The physical stores feel like boutiques: warm tones, clean displays, nothing out of place. Customers don’t just come in to buy shoes. They come in because the experience itself feels premium.
For 48 years, the brand has grown to 65 stores across the region, becoming a notable women’s fashion brand in each country.
Then, the brand came the question every established retailer eventually faces: how do you take something that works in the physical world – the care, the curation, the feel – and make it work online?
Tiendas MD already had a Shopify store when this story began. It was functional. Products were listed. Orders could be placed. But Luis Ayala, who leads the brand’s digital vision, knew it wasn’t living up to what Tiendas MD stands for.
Bringing that 48-year history into the digital world was a huge responsibility. We needed a platform that could truly translate our premium brand identity to the web.
– Luis from the Tiendas MD team
Three things, in particular, were holding the store back.
Tiendas MD sells footwear, and color is one of the first things a shopper looks for. But on the product grid – the page where customers browse collections – there was no way to see color options at a glance. To find out whether a shoe came in beige or black, a customer had to click into each product individually. For a boutique where color drives the purchase decision, that friction was costing sales.
The store served a Spanish-speaking audience, but English labels kept surfacing across the theme – buttons, badges, UI messages that hadn’t been localized. For Tiendas MD, a brand that prides itself on intentionality, having “Add to Cart” appear instead of “Agregar al carrito” was more than a small oversight. It was a signal that the store hadn’t been finished.
Nearly 90% of Tiendas MD’s shoppers arrive on a phone – and many of them use mid-range devices. A slow or cluttered mobile experience wasn’t just a technical issue. It was a business problem. The store needed to load fast, feel premium, and guide shoppers toward a purchase without friction.
Luis knew what he wanted for Tiendas MD: a digital flagship that felt as curated and intentional as walking into the physical store. What he needed was the right theme – and the right team behind it.
Luis didn’t make this decision quickly. After researching options, Luis found Maximize Theme by Omni Themes. And he didn’t just browse through the demo store; he actually worked on setting up the store on the free trial plan to see how Maximize matches MD’s online presence expectations.
I’ve been working with Maximize (Vigor) for several days now and I’m genuinely impressed – the section depth, the layout flexibility, and the overall architecture make it the right fit for what I’m building.
– Luis from the Tiendas MD team
Several things made Maximize the final choice for Tiendas MD:
Most theme companies wait for a sale before offering serious support.
Omni Themes works differently.
When Luis first reached out in early March – still weeks before any purchase – the team responded the same morning and scheduled a live video call for the next day. On that call, the agent walked him through the theme’s mobile performance, how the free consulting process works, and how color swatches are configured. Every question got an answer.
A few weeks later, the team went even further. They ran a live demo setup directly on Luis’s store – setting up the color swatches on the product grid and translating the full UI to Spanish – so he could test both features on his actual store before deciding.
He purchased Maximize after around 1 month of carefully examining and thoroughly communicating with the Omni Themes team – the team behind it.
The custom Figma mockup, delivered 8 days after purchase
Once Luis purchased the theme, he submitted his design requirements through Omni Themes’ free consulting program. His submission was detailed: specific color codes, typography preferences, photography guidelines, and a clear priority: mobile-first.
Around a week after his purchase, the Omni Themes design team delivered a full Figma mockup – a detailed visual blueprint of what the store would look like, covering the homepage, collection pages, and product pages.
Luis and his team spent the weekend reviewing every detail. The layout, the spacing, the image hierarchy, and the way the warm cream palette tied everything together. Their response was direct:
I’ve been working with Maximize (Vigor) for several days now and I’m genuinely impressed – the section depth, the layout flexibility, and the overall architecture make it the right fit for what I’m building.
– Luis from the Tiendas MD team
Then, the developers from the Omni Themes team started immediately on setting up the theme following the design. Several days later, the full setup was delivered – one day ahead of the committed deadline.
The Tiendas MD homepage opens with a full-screen hero image – a lifestyle shot of footwear in motion. There’s generous space around the subject. A headline and a button sit cleanly without competing. The overall feeling is editorial: intentional, warm, unhurried.
Below the hero, a collection grid showcases the Women’s, Men’s, and Puma collections. Product cards display in a portrait ratio, with warm cream backgrounds that make the footwear itself the focus. On each card, color variant swatches appear directly – shoppers can see available colors at a glance, before clicking into any product. For Tiendas MD, this alone solves one of the core problems they came in with.
Each collection page opens with a short editorial banner – a soft gradient in warm cream and taupe – that establishes the brand identity before any products appear. Breadcrumbs at the top of the page show the shopper exactly where they are, written in uppercase Spanish: INICIO > COLECCIĂ“N. That uppercase formatting was a specific detail Luis had requested; implementing it required a small piece of custom code from the Omni Themes technical team, which they delivered as part of the setup.
Below the banner, the product grid extends in clean columns. Nothing competes with the shoes.
On the product page, the shopper sees the item in full portrait format. Color swatches appear immediately below the product name. A “Low Stock” indicator shows when sizes are running out.
As the shopper scrolls – reading the description, checking the size guide – a sticky “Add to Cart” bar stays locked at the bottom of the screen. It doesn’t disappear. The price, the size selector, and the purchase button are always visible and always accessible.
When the shopper taps “Add to Cart,” a drawer slides up from the bottom of the screen. Inside: the item they just added, a clear subtotal, and a visual progress bar showing how much more they need to spend to qualify for free shipping. The whole flow happens without leaving the product page.
Every label, every button, every message on the page is in Spanish. There is no English anywhere that a customer would see. The experience is complete.
PageSpeed scores from the live store for Desktop & Mobile (video recorded by Luis from Tiendas MD)
The store’s PageSpeed scores – 98 on desktop and 90 on mobile – reflect the work both sides put in. The Maximize Theme’s mobile-first architecture gave the store a lean, fast foundation. Luis brought his own performance discipline to the launch: images pre-optimized in WebP format, system fonts chosen for speed, assets sized precisely for mobile screens. The result was a combination of the theme’s structure and the brand’s own preparation.
On the same day as the launch, Luis published a five-star review on the Shopify Theme Store:
Maximize Theme is published by Omni Themes, a brand under BSS Commerce. Founded in 2012, BSS Commerce works with over 100,000 merchants worldwide and is one of only three Shopify Premier Partners in Southeast Asia.Â
Tiendas MD’s success story is strong proof that every physical store can easily make its first digital footprint, just by finding the right partner. If you’re building a Shopify store and you want it to feel as considered as your brand, Maximize Theme was built for exactly that – and the free setup service means you don’t have to figure it out alone.