The projectin one read
GZO is a Japanese-culture brand from Osaka — clothes (traditional silhouettes, modern fabrics) and premium cultural experiences, united by the ethos "The Moment." The previous developer left and took the old site with them. We're rebuilding on Shopify, solo and AI-assisted, to launch with the Summer 2026 collection as a pre-order drop.
静止こそ運動だ
Embrace stillness in movement.
gzoexperience.com expires and has not been renewed. The domain is ours — the transfer completed — but the registration lapses on the date below. If it goes, we lose the name that matches @the_gzo_experience and every piece of existing collateral, the one recovered from the old developer. Renewing is independent of every other open question on this page.
The four places
This is the mental model that makes everything else click. Four things — three of them separate git repos.
The Brain
This folder. Docs only — no shippable site code. The project's memory: decisions, learnings, backlog, brand, runbook.
The Store
The actual shop. Liquid theme on a Horizon base. All commerce lives here — product pages, cart, checkout, apps.
The Landing
The immersive front door. 3D / WebGPU brand world. Zero commerce — every button links out to the Store.
The Lab
Scratch sandbox. 13 competing art directions, all clickable, all on real catalog data. Tracked inside the Brain.
Plus two non-repo places: Google Drive (big media —
booklet, media kit, shoots, videos) and Shopify admin
(the store itself, driven from Claude via the Shopify MCP). The Store and Landing sit on disk under
site/ but are gitignored by the Brain — Shopify's deploy model needs each at a repo root.
That split is deliberate, not cruft.
The Brain — what it actually is
A set of living markdown docs that any AI reads on startup and keeps current. It's why you can walk away for two weeks and pick up cleanly.
CLAUDE.md ← the rules. Every AI tool reads this first. context/ PROJECT.md ← WHERE WE ARE. Status, team, timeline. BACKLOG.md ← WHAT'S NEXT. Ranked launch checklist. [YOU] vs [C] tags. DECISIONS.md ← WHAT'S SETTLED. Append-only. Never rewrite — supersede. LEARNINGS.md ← WHAT BROKE AND WHY. The scar tissue. brand/ BRAND.md (voice) · PRODUCTS.md (catalog + GIDs) · ART_DIRECTION.md tech/ TECH_STACK.md · RUNBOOK.md (deploys) · COMPANY.md (legal entity) research/ original dossier. Snapshot — don't rewrite. deliverables/ exported docs (audits, briefings). Supersede, don't edit.
Two conventions do the heavy lifting
Each fact lives in exactly one file. Everything else links to it. No duplication → no drift.
DECISIONS.md is append-only. When you change your mind you add a new dated entry saying "supersedes 2026-07-07" — you never delete the old one. That's why you can read the log and understand why things are the way they are, not just what they are.
And the part that's easy to miss
Per the 2026-07-21 decision, the Brain isn't just a record — it's shared fuel. Once the team has it (via a free GitHub org), anyone can point ChatGPT or Claude at the repo and it instantly knows GZO's voice, prices, products and decisions. Marketing campaign, press kit, event microsite — no starting from scratch, no waiting on Jules.
That's why the docs are written to be machine-readable, not personal shorthand. There's also a memory layer holding what doesn't belong in the repo: deploy workflow, catalog workflow, image naming, the immersive quality bar.
The flow — how work happens
You ──talk to──► Claude
│
reads the Brain
│
┌─────────────┼─────────────┐
▼ ▼ ▼
The Store The Landing The Lab
│ │ │
shopify theme push git push npm run dev
--live main → Oxygen :5178
│ │
▼ ▼
live shop live landing
│
└──► Claude updates the Brain (unprompted)
Four deploy paths, four different mechanics
Store — Liquid theme
Handle with careAlways as one compound command. This push is a destructive sync — it deletes remote files missing locally, and it's cwd-sensitive. Run from the wrong directory once (2026-07-07) and it deleted every template on the live theme; the whole store 404'd. GitHub is version control only here — Shopify's GitHub import truncated this ~450-file theme three times.
Landing — Hydrogen
AutomaticThe easy one. Every push and PR also gets its own preview URL.
Catalog — products, prices, images
Never clicked in adminThe GZO Catalog Google Sheet is source of truth → Claude reads it → pushes to Shopify
via the MCP, matched by handle/SKU so updates land in place.
Critical gotcha: a product being ACTIVE is not the same as being published
to a channel. Publish to both Online Store and Hydrogen, or one frontend shows
"No products found."
Lab — art directions
Local onlyNever deployed. Prototype here, hand-port what wins.
Architecture — and the hard line
The big call, made 2026-07-07:
Hydrogen = landing only. Liquid store = all commerce.
The Landing has no product pages,
no cart, no
checkout — those routes were deleted so a second cart can never exist. Every CTA on the Landing is an
absolute link to the Store via one constant, STORE_ORIGIN.
Why
Third-party Shopify apps are Liquid theme widgets. STOQ — the pre-order app — will never render on Hydrogen. One commerce surface = one cart, zero sync problems, no custom pre-order code to maintain. And in Jules's words: "we don't need fancy 3D for the shopping experience — less is more."
Domain plan that follows from it
gzoexperience.com → the Landing shop.gzoexperience.com → the Store (checkout follows) www → redirects to apex
The routing switch is the Target dropdown in Shopify Settings → Domains. There's no separate Oxygen DNS — everything points at Shopify and Target decides which storefront serves it.
Where it stands — verified live 2026-08-03
Done
- Store live, dark-skinned in full GZO black — Orbitron / Space Grotesk / Shippori Mincho
- 4 garments ACTIVE with real studio photography — NAGAZAMUE, NIKA POKA, HANTEN, SAMUE. Hoodie in draft, price TBD from Axel
- 6 experiences ACTIVE with real prices; 4 of 6 have real photography (Bike + Aizome still placeholders)
- Tax, shipping (domestic + ~27 countries), 特商法 page, Refund/ToS/Shipping policies, favicon, OG cards
- STOQ pre-order app installed and wired
- Landing deployed, auto-deploying on Oxygen
- 13 art directions built — strongest: UTSUROI, KEIKO, SERIAL, SENGEN
Urgent
- Renew the domain. Registry expiry 2026-08-15. Verified against the registry today — still not renewed
- Apex still 301-redirects to the login-gated Oxygen URL — half-wired, exactly as left at the pause
- shop. DNS now resolves (CNAME → shops.myshopify.com) so that step got done — but HTTPS returns nothing, meaning it isn't connected in Shopify Settings → Domains yet, so no SSL. Expected: next step in the resume checklist
Blocking launch
- Shopify Payments verification — bank + identity as 株式会社YMI Experience, then one full test order. No verified payments = no revenue
- Finish the domain wiring — paused on purpose, waiting on the landing choice
- Fill the 特商法 blanks — rep name, phone, postal code, returns text. Placeholder legal notices are non-compliant in Japan
- Branded contact email — currently an Apple private-relay address
In flight
- Uncommitted work in the tree from a session after 21 Jul — a KEITAI upgrade (the Y2K handheld direction)
- Hand-drawn pixel icons per experience, a "YOUR JOURNEY" menu entry wired to the brand poem, LCD "fortune" lines pulled from garment verses
- ~370 lines across 3 files. Not committed, not lost
The one decision everything waits on
Pick the landing direction winner. It gates the domain wiring, which gates going
public, which gates launch. It was hoped for 2026-07-22 — that came and went.
Review at /?dir in the Lab.
The whole thing in one picture
GOOGLE DRIVE SHOPIFY ADMIN
(big media, booklet, (the store, driven by MCP)
shoots, videos) │
│ │
└──────────► BRAIN ◄───────────┘
(docs, decisions,
memory, rules)
│
┌─────────────┴─────────────┐
│ │
THE LAB ───pick winner───► THE LANDING
(13 directions, gzoexperience.com
scratch only) brand world, no cart
│
every CTA →
▼
THE STORE
shop.gzoexperience.com
products · cart · checkout