By Chris Ledden · Reviewed October 2026
13,000+
customers
42 → 7
apps on the store
3.9s → 1.3s
page load time
$3,000
a month in software costs cut
Plus → Grow
Shopify plan
Where we started
Daily Bloom is the apparel brand my co-founder and I started in 2019 for the neurodivergent community. It’s family-run, it sells on Shopify, and almost everything ships through Printify. By this year we’d grown to more than 13,000 customers and about $2 million in lifetime sales.
Our stack grew with us, one reasonable fix at a time. By the start of 2026 we had 42 apps installed, we were paying for Shopify Plus, our pages took almost four seconds to load for a typical visitor, an agency was running our email, and some of our paid ads weren’t paying back.
What I set out to do
The goal was easy to say and hard to do: stop the bleeding. Cut what we didn’t need, find out what was actually bringing in revenue, and get the business to a place where it didn’t depend on me being on call for everything.
I ran it the way I’d run a review at Amazon. Get the real numbers first, then decide.
What I did
Rebuilt the theme and audited every app
We moved off our old theme to one built for mobile speed. I hired the developer on Upwork and did the CTO half myself: the brief, the app audit, the coding standards, and the QA checklist. I went through all 42 apps one by one. One app replaced three that were doing overlapping jobs in the cart. A $299-a-month app came out entirely. My one rule was that no app got cancelled until its replacement was confirmed working.
The results showed up fast. Our real-visitor load time (Largest Contentful Paint, measured at the 75th percentile) went from 3.9 seconds in August to 1.3 seconds in September, moving from Google’s “needs improvement” range into “good.” Today the store runs seven apps that add features, plus the integrations it can’t work without, like Printify and our messaging and forms tools.
Questioned the plan itself
I listed everything Shopify Plus gave us that we’d actually miss, and the list was close to empty. Scripts were gone, checkout changes had moved to apps, and Shopify Flow now works on every plan. Even B2B, which we’re exploring for group orders from clinics and schools, now comes in a basic form on the lower plans. The real question was payment processing, because higher plans get lower card rates. So I ran our order volume against the fees on each plan. During our quieter months, Plus’s lower rates didn’t come close to covering its cost. Plus starts at about $2,500 a month and Grow at about $105, so we moved to Grow and saved roughly $2,400 a month.
Audited the email program
Our open rates looked amazing, 80% and higher, while click rates sat under 1%. The “engaged” segments were counting Apple Mail’s automatic opens as real people, and the automation meant to clean the list had one person in it because it relied on a profile field nobody was filling in. The agency fixed the segments within three days of me showing them. Once we were measuring humans, our real click rate was 0.57%, against a 1% to 2% benchmark. The A/B tests we’d been running were roughly 17 times too small to prove anything. The one test big enough to trust said plain text beat a designed email three to one, so we’re now rebuilding our emails in a plain, personal voice.
Found out where the money actually came from
I pulled our Shopify data instead of trusting each platform’s own reporting. Google organic search was our biggest identifiable channel, about a quarter of revenue, at zero cost. Our add-to-cart rate had held steady at 5% to 7% the whole time. The store wasn’t broken. We had a traffic problem, not a conversion problem, so we put our effort into search, social content, and group orders for clinics and schools instead of buying more ads.
Automated the repetitive work
I built n8n workflows for jobs like tagging best sellers, and AI tools that draft product descriptions and collection pages in our brand voice. The Printify problems I kept solving by hand, like catching risky orders before they ship and seeing true costs including Printify shipping, became PODPilot, a Shopify app other POD sellers now use.
What changed
I’ll be straight about one thing: our sales volume has cooled off since we stopped buying ads that didn’t pay back. But every order we take now is more profitable than it was, because we’re not paying for unprofitable traffic, extra apps, or a plan we didn’t need.
What this means for your store
Everything in my Stack & Spend Audit, I did on my own store first. The audit is the same process: every app, every plan, every tool, and the data that says what’s actually working, ranked by what it’s worth to you.