Foul Mouth Finds was a COVID-era novelty brand — pillows and candles with a bold "unapologetically edgy" identity — that had gone dark. The original Shopify store no longer existed. What survived was a genuinely strong asset library: a finished logo, business cards, a packaging insert, and dozens of unsorted product mockups sitting in disconnected files.
This case study documents the process of turning that scattered archive into a real, functioning store — the curation decisions, the content-moderation system I had to invent, and the unglamorous UX work of fighting an admin interface that hides basic settings in non-obvious places. Nothing here was invented for a portfolio brief. Every decision below was made under real time pressure, on a ticking Shopify trial clock.
The case study is real. The friction was real. The store is live.
Dozens of mockups existed across Canva files, old exports, and loose screenshots — some finished, some half-edited, some duplicates. No master list of what existed, let alone what was good.
The brand's identity is built on profanity. Payment processors and platform terms don't universally tolerate uncensored language on storefronts — a compliance problem requiring a real design system.
Shopify's back end has changed since this brand last attempted to launch. Settings moved, got renamed, or hid behind onboarding flows. Relearning the tool was its own UX problem.
Reference material kept leaking into places it didn't belong — like wax-blend trivia pasted under a sarcastic product description. Consistency required active editing, not just instinct.
Rather than uploading everything that existed, the collection was deliberately narrowed to 8 pillow designs (5 everyday, 3 Christmas) and 7 candle designs (4 everyday, 3 Christmas) — enough to show range without diluting quality. A tight, curated catalog reads as intentional merchandising; a wall of near-duplicate designs reads as an unfiltered dump.
Selection criteria, in order: does the design already carry finished branding · does it add tonal range rather than repeat an existing joke · does the explicit language sit somewhere that can be cleanly censored without breaking the composition.
Tried on a design where the explicit word sat inside a busy floral composition. The AI fill smeared the background and left an obvious flat patch — worse than the word it covered.
Tried where the explicit word was the entire second line of a phrase. Removing it left a blank box that broke the composition and read as an obvious edit, not a design choice.
A smiley or cat emoji, sized and positioned exactly where the word had been, reading naturally in the sentence. Preserved composition, kept the joke legible, and gave the brand a consistent, repeatable signature for censorship — rather than fifteen individually-solved problems.
Rather than a generic blur, the emoji swap is playful enough to feel like part of the joke, not a compliance patch bolted on top of it. It's the single decision most responsible for the catalog feeling cohesive.
Splitting everyday vs. Christmas signals real merchandising thinking rather than "here's everything I have," and mirrors how a shopper actually thinks about the catalog: what's needed now vs. what's seasonal.
Early on, "Pillows" and "Candles" existed as backend collections but weren't reachable from navigation — meaning a real shopper would only ever see one undifferentiated catalog. Finding the actual menu-editing surface, buried inside the theme editor's Header block, was the most time-consuming fix of the project — and the most invisible once working.
Generic material-spec research was useful while writing but never belonged verbatim on a live listing. Catching and removing it — down to one clean spec line per product — was a discipline pass as much as a design decision.
A print-on-demand integration kept gating the workflow behind a mandatory store connection that repeatedly broke. Rather than debug an integration with no payoff, the fix was recognizing it wasn't necessary — direct upload achieved the identical visual result with a fraction of the friction. Knowing when not to use a tool is still a design decision.
Most portfolios show the finished result and skip the part where things actually broke. This project produced a genuine, ongoing trail of real bugs — an unfamiliar admin interface, a platform that had changed since the last time it was used, and one real scare. Here's a sample of what actually went wrong and how it got fixed, not cleaned up after the fact.
All 15 freshly-uploaded products displayed as sold out on the live storefront, despite never having inventory tracking configured on purpose.
Found via Shopify's bulk product editor that "Track quantity" defaults to on with zero stock. Bulk-unchecked it across every product in one pass instead of editing 15 pages individually.
"Pillows" and "Candles" collections were built correctly in the backend, but the site's navigation only ever offered a single undifferentiated "Catalog" link — visitors had no way to browse by category.
The actual menu editor wasn't where expected — it was buried inside the theme editor's Header block, several clicks deeper than the obvious "Navigation" settings page. Once found, added direct links to both collections.
Mid-edit in the theme editor, the entire product catalog appeared to vanish from the admin — a genuine moment of panic that work had been lost, not a hypothetical "what if" for a case study.
Nothing was actually deleted. A theme-editor undo (Ctrl+Z) restored everything instantly. The real lesson wasn't the bug — it was resisting the urge to start rebuilding from scratch before checking the simplest possible fix first.
This store's admin looked meaningfully different from the last time it was used years earlier — menus renamed, settings relocated, a dropshipping marketplace now sitting where "add product" used to be the obvious first click. Relearning a familiar tool is its own real skill, not a failure of memory.
Deciding how to censor explicit language for a commercial platform wasn't a copy-paste choice — it took three failed attempts before landing on a system that actually preserved each design's composition and read as intentional brand voice rather than a compliance patch.
Foul Mouth Finds was fully built and screenshot-documented on a Shopify trial account, which has since expired. It was not launched commercially, and the original founder is not currently pursuing the business — this project exists as a design and UX exercise, not an active company.
If revived commercially, the logical next steps would be: connecting a real fulfillment pipeline, building out size/variant options per product, and expanding the curated 15-SKU catalog using the same selection criteria established here.