Heavenly Heat Saunas: Custom Shopify Store and Sauna Configurator

Heavenly Heat Saunas pioneered the non-toxic sauna category. The cabins are solid wood with no glue, plywood, stains or sealants, the heaters sit behind an integrated Faraday cage, and the brand publishes third-party EMF and VOC results rather than asking customers to take the claims on trust. Saunas run from about $3,400 to more than $10,000, and nobody buys one on impulse. A customer reads, compares heat types, measures the room, checks the electrical, and often talks to a specialist before ordering.

The Shopify store did not match the product. After moving to Shopify on an out-of-the-box theme, the team had spent months adjusting it, then building one-off pages in a page-builder app to get around its limits. Those pages grew heavy and slow, nothing shared a design system, and every new section meant going back into code. On our first call the brand described it as putting lipstick on a pig.

What they asked for was a custom theme that becomes the brand's own asset: elevated to the standard of the wellness-technology brands they admire, editable by the marketing team, and reusable for other brands in the family.

The usual direct-to-consumer playbook does not apply here. Urgency banners and abandoned-cart tricks do not move a customer who is deciding where a 320-pound sauna will live. Three things do.

• A store that feels as considered as the product, so the first few seconds build trust instead of doubt.
• Every pre-purchase question answered on the page: heat type, size, voltage, EMF, delivery, warranty, assembly.
• A team that can change copy, imagery and product details themselves, the week they need to.

Those three became the brief for every page.

The homepage opens on the brand's own photography and a single claim, then does the work a sales floor would do. "Find the right sauna for you" lays out the five sauna types, far infrared, red light, traditional, combination and outdoor, each with one line on who it suits. "Before you buy any sauna, know what to look for" turns the brand's material standards into a checklist a shopper can use against any competitor. An education center carries the buying guide, the infrared-versus-traditional comparison and the sizing guide, so the research a customer would otherwise do across ten tabs happens on one store.

The mega menu pulls its imagery straight from the products it links to, so when the team swaps a product photo the navigation updates with it.

Two paths lead to a product. The sauna quiz the brand already ran stays in place. Beside it we built "Build a Sauna", a configurator that asks five questions, how many people, inside or outside, which heating experience, what the electrical setup is and how much space there is, and returns a best match with a second option to consider, each with price, financing estimate, reviews and an Add to Cart button.

The important design decision is what the configurator refuses to do. Heavenly Heat builds fixed models, not custom combinations, so the tool is a selector over real products: a choice that rules out a model removes it from the later steps, and if no model fits every answer the page says so and points to a specialist. It runs on a configurator metaobject in the Shopify admin, so the team can add a model or change a rule without a developer.

Collection pages filter by category, size, price and availability, and every product card carries the two facts that decide most sauna purchases: whether it plugs into a standard 120V outlet and that it is ultra-low EMF. A "Best for" line on each card does the pre-sorting a customer would otherwise do by opening every product.

A comparison table sets the four sauna styles side by side: capacity, what each is best for, heat style, voltage, red light, maximum temperature, electrical requirements, indoor or outdoor, and the monthly financing price. It is the single page we expect customers to come back to most.

Saunas and red light panels sell differently, so each has its own product template, with product-specific content held in metaobjects and the shared sections controlled by the theme. On a sauna page the buy area carries the price, the financing line, the size choice and the four highlights that matter most, placed directly under the button because that is the moment a customer reads them. Assembly service and a red light panel sit alongside as the things customers also buy.

Below the buy area the page works through the questions that stall an order. Key features of the model. "Before you order, make sure it fits", with interior and exterior dimensions, door width, weight, clearance requirements and where a sauna like this can actually go. Installation, with the assembly video, what you will need and a note that no contractor is required. Warranty, financing, free shipping, HSA and FSA eligibility and the 1988 founding date gathered into one block titled "A serious investment in your health deserves full protection". An EMF explainer that takes on the category's weakest claim directly: most brands measure one field, Heavenly Heat measures both and publishes the numbers.

Customer reviews are Shopify-hosted video, stored as metaobjects, so the team adds a new review by uploading a clip rather than installing another app.

Everything product-specific lives in metaobjects the team edits inline from the product itself; everything shared lives in theme sections they rearrange in the editor. New landing pages come from existing blocks rather than new code. We migrated the products, pages and blog posts from the brand's previous Shopify store into the new theme, left the app-controlled pages for the brand to manage, and launched in October 2026.

The theme is Heavenly Heat's own intellectual property. When the next brand in the family is ready, it starts from this foundation instead of from a template.

Does a Shopify product configurator need an app?

Not when the catalog is a fixed set of models. Heavenly Heat's configurator is a theme section reading a metaobject, which keeps the logic in the admin, the page fast and the monthly app bill unchanged. A configurator that generates custom products or prices is a different problem and usually does need one.

Can one custom Shopify theme serve two brands?

Yes, if it is built that way from the start: brand values in theme settings, content in metaobjects and sections, nothing hard-coded. That was a requirement here, and it shaped how the theme is organised.

What changes for a high-ticket brand after a build like this?

The team stops waiting on a developer to change a page, the store answers the questions a specialist used to answer by phone, and every piece of research a customer needs sits one click from the buy button. Results on this build are the brand's to share; we will add them here as they come in.

Conspire is a Shopify Plus Premier Partner founded in Los Angeles in 2011. We build Shopify stores and run fractional Shopify teams for established brands.