Lead Apparel is the company behind Launch — a modern company merch store platform used by startups, enterprises, and remote teams. We help businesses launch branded employee stores with premium brands, flexible payment codes, and direct-to-employee fulfillment.
Lead Apparel is a premium branded merchandise company founded in 2007. They specialize in high-quality custom apparel and accessories for businesses, and are the team behind Launch — a company swag store platform that lets organizations run branded employee stores with premium brands, flexible payment codes, and direct-to-employee fulfillment. Instead of low-cost promo items, they focus on retail brands employees actually want to wear and use.
Macarons are perishable. Some ZIP codes can't accept overnight shipping. Drop days (limited-edition flavors) hit 20× normal traffic in minutes. Their old store crashed on drop days, charged customers in invalid ZIP codes, and had no gifting flow — losing them a huge segment of their natural customer base.
We built ZIP validation directly into the cart and PDP, custom Launchpad-style drop deployment, gifting flows with message cards and scheduled shipping, and a checkout tuned for impulse + gifting purchases.
Each one solves a specific part of the brief above.
Real-time validation prevents invalid ZIP purchases from entering cart
Pre-staged inventory with countdown, sold-out gates, and waitlist
Message cards, recipient addressing, scheduled delivery, gift wrap
Daily inventory sync with cold-chain capacity constraints
Theme architecture handles 20× traffic spikes without latency
Holiday subscription flow for repeat gifters
Every engagement runs the same four stages, so you always know what happens next and what you owe us at each one.
We review the current theme, apps and analytics, then write a fixed-scope SOW with named deliverables and a date.
Work happens in a dev store on a Git-backed workflow. You get a preview link from week one, not a reveal at the end.
Cross-browser and device QA, redirect map, analytics verification, then a launch window agreed with you rather than dropped on you.
Fourteen to sixty days of included post-launch support while real traffic finds the edge cases.
Conversion is up 2.1× after the PDP rebuild, AOV is up 34% year-over-year thanks to gifting upsells, and drop days are now smooth — zero downtime across 12 drops in the past year.
Every drop day was a stress event before. Now they're just a Tuesday. The team built us infrastructure we can actually grow on.
The exact platform, services and integrations behind the build.
Long-form studies from the same team, with the numbers behind them.
Case study
16-week build
Custom Shopify Plus build with prescription-aware checkout, doctor-consultation flow, and 10K+ SKU catalog tuned for sub-2s mobile loads.
Case study
Multi-region · 12 weeks
Premium DTC brand expanded from 1 to 3 markets in 6 months. Custom subscription flow on Recharge, headless-ready architecture.
Case study
Apparel · CRO sprint
Editorial PDPs, modular collections, and a checkout rebuild that turned more mobile traffic into purchases for the Californian apparel brand.
