Dec 12, 2025
How Pashley Cycles Uses Shopify to Sell Fully Configurable, Hand-Built Bikes
Pashley Cycles is one of Britain's most distinctive cycling brands.
Their bikes are handbuilt to order in Stratford-upon-Avon, configurable across multiple dimensions: frame size, gear count, colour, custom colours, and a range of optional extras.
Selling a product like this online — where the customer needs to make several meaningful decisions before the bike can be built — requires a product page architecture that Shopify doesn't handle out of the box.
Dewsign has partnered with Pashley for over 25 years.
The Product Configuration Challenge
Standard Shopify supports three product options. A configurable Pashley bicycle needs more — size, gears, standard colours, custom colour options, and optional accessories. We built a custom configuration interface using Shopify's native variant system for the primary options (size and gears, which affect pricing and availability) and custom metafields for the extended option set. The configuration UI presents all options in a logical, progressive sequence with real-time pricing updates as selections change.
Custom colours presented a specific challenge: Pashley offers bespoke colour options that don't correspond to a pre-built variant — they're a specification that gets passed to the order as a note and actioned by the build team. The configuration interface treats custom colour selections differently from standard variants, capturing the specification in a format that's clear to both the customer and the Pashley production team.
Pan-and-Zoom Product Photography
We built a custom pan-and-zoom feature allowing customers to click into a high-resolution product image and pan around it freely, zooming into specific components — the saddle, handlebars, luggage rack, chainset — in a way that communicates the quality of the product far better than a standard image gallery.
For a £1,000+ bicycle, this level of product presentation pays for its development cost in reduced pre-purchase queries and higher conversion confidence.
Twenty Five Years of Partnership
The current Shopify store is the fifth website we've built for Pashley, following a bespoke website with a custom CRM system we developed before Shopify was a meaningful option.
The partnership has lasted because we understand their business deeply — the brand positioning, the production constraints, the customer base, the commercial objectives — and because we've been honest about what we recommended and why throughout each project. That depth of understanding produces better work.
If you have a product range that requires a Shopify store built beyond what standard themes and configurations can deliver, this is work we do regularly.
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