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Chicago, IL
Shopify design and development for Chicago brands.
Looking for a Shopify agency in Chicago? Start with what actually needs doing: build the store, redesign the one you've outgrown, or market it once it's live with ads, email, search and testing. For brands doing six to eight figures a year.
It runs from April to October.
Selling from Chicagoland
What Chicago makes, and the freight lines it sits on.
A lot of the country's freight changes hands in Chicago. These are the conditions a brand here is selling in, each with where it comes from.
A quarter of the rail freight
Every day, one-fourth of the nation's freight rail traffic is heading to, from or through Chicago — about 37,500 railcars.
Source: CREATE Program
Containers start and end here
In 2016, metropolitan Chicago was the largest point of origin and termination for intermodal shipments in the U.S., with over 7.8 million freight containers.
Food is the big maker
Chicago's traditional food and beverage manufacturing industry was the largest in the U.S. in 2022, employing over 65,000 people, by World Business Chicago's count.
Source: World Business Chicago, 2022
The restaurant trade comes to town
The National Restaurant Association Show is at McCormick Place in Chicago on May 22–25, 2027.
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Non-branded search · paid
Reaching shoppers who didn't know the brand's name yet.
Cabi is a national direct-seller in women's apparel. Its search traffic leaned on people already typing its name, and its paid budget had grown faster than its returns.
We did the keyword research, metadata and content work that reaches people before they know which product they want, and rebuilt paid around efficiency. For a Chicagoland brand selling into three states, that's how a store gets found beyond its own name.
Read the case study
Start here
Get the store built — or get the one you have selling better.
A build is one project: the design and theme, your catalog, the move off whatever you’re on now, and a launch somebody watches. From $10,000 one-time, and you own every bit of it.
Already on Shopify? Shopify Growth keeps the store improving month to month, from $2,250/mo. Ads, email, search and testing go on top when they’ll pay for themselves.
Questions, Chicago edition.
Are you actually in Chicago?
No. Our home base is outside Philadelphia, an hour ahead of you, and the team is remote. We'd rather be straight about that than put a Loop address in the footer and hope nobody checks. The nearest client we have is in Wisconsin, and we've said exactly where.
Do you work with Midwest brands, or are we the outlier?
We do. Modern Prairie is in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin — a couple of hours north of you — and it's one of our longest-running accounts, covering the migration, the email program and the paid side. Being an hour behind us has never once been the hard part of that relationship.
We exhibit at the Restaurant Show every May. Can the store do anything with that?
Yes — plan around it rather than through it. The show's at McCormick Place on May 22–25, 2027, and the weeks before it are when trade buyers look you up. Have a wholesale inquiry page they can actually find, a landing page behind the booth's QR code, and an email to everyone you met while they still remember the stand. Most of what a trade show is worth leaks away in the week after it.
We make food in Chicago and sell mostly to restaurants. Should we sell direct too?
Probably, if the product works in a home kitchen. Food and beverage manufacturing here is the biggest in the country, so the competition for a buyer's shelf is real — and a direct store is the one channel where you set the price and keep the email address. Start with the two or three products a home cook would reorder, sized for a pantry rather than a walk-in.
Chicago's a freight town. Does that help a small online store?
Less directly than it sounds. The rail and container numbers describe big shippers, not your parcel, and a shopper never sees them. What they do mean is that fulfillment is worth comparing properly here rather than defaulting to whoever's nearest — and whichever way you go, we'll connect it to Shopify so stock and tracking update without anyone copying them across.
Where we work
Chicago and the collar counties around it.
The Census Bureau's Chicago metro crosses into Indiana — Lake, Porter, Jasper and Newton counties — and its wider combined area reaches up to Kenosha, Wisconsin, so the local audience is set by the commute, not the state line.
We’re a remote agency with a home base in Norristown, Pennsylvania — the team is spread across the country, with a good chunk of it on the west coast. Everything runs on video calls, so you get the same people and the same hours whether you’re downtown or an hour out of it.
Neighborhoods and towns we cover
- The Loop
- West Loop
- Wicker Park
- Logan Square
- Lincoln Park
- Evanston
- Oak Park
- Naperville
Nearby metros
More markets in the Great Lakes
We’ll tell you what we’d do first with your Chicago store.
Thirty minutes, free, and the notes are yours whether or not we work together.
