Top Shopify Stores. Read the List Backwards.

I read about 30 "top Shopify stores" articles in a week.

They're the same article. A list of brands, a line or two on each, the word "authentic", and a link to Shopify Plus near the bottom.

What they skip is how each brand got onto the list. Whose audience it launched into. What it sold before it had a store. Whether it's still in one piece.

One 2026 list opens its "DTC at scale (Shopify Plus)" group with Allbirds - Bruh.

This is a dead business, that is now ‘AI Data centers’ because.

Someone else's audience

SKIMS was co-founded in 2019 by Jens Grede and Kim Kardashian. Her TV show started in 2007, so she'd been on screen for twelve years before the first product. A round led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives valued SKIMS at US$5 billion in November 2025, and Shopify still names it as a customer.

That wasn't free customer acquisition. The audience took years and a lot of media. It was paid for elsewhere and earlier. Without it, you're looking at the output of an asset you don't own.

Heinz started in 1869. Mattel started in a garage in 1945. Shopify's 2023 results release named both as brands that use it. For companies like that the store is one more channel.

"An established company uses Shopify" and "a company was built on Shopify" are different claims. The lists squish them together because a logo is easier to click than a history.

Gymshark, properly

Gymshark is the one I'd spend more time on. Ben Francis and Lewis Morgan started it in 2012. Ben was 19, sewing and screen-printing in his parents' garage. Forbes says he sent product to YouTubers he admired, then paid small amounts to fitness creators to wear it. That was before influencer marketing turned into a rate card (I wrote about what happened next).

Shopify's 2023 release names Gymshark too. But Gymshark didn't win because Shopify had a feature its competitors couldn't get. A small team understood a fitness subculture, found creators nobody else was renting yet, and kept compounding that lead. In 2020 General Atlantic bought a 21% stake at a valuation of over £1 billion.

If anything, Gymshark makes the platform look interchangeable. The scarce asset was the audience.

Allbirds, first on the list

Allbirds, co-founded by Kiwi Tim Brown, listed on Nasdaq in November 2021. Its 2025 annual report shows revenue of US$152.5 million, down from US$189.8 million, and "substantial doubt" about continuing as a going concern.

Early in 2026 it agreed to sell the brand to an affiliate of American Exchange Group for roughly US$40 million. The listed company has since renamed itself Smartbird and says it operates in AI infrastructure.

That same list, updated on 19 October, has Allbirds first under "DTC at scale" and doesn't mention any of this.

So What.

A list of big stores can still be useful. Read it backwards.

Ignore the theme. Ask where the first 10,000 customers came from. Ask what existed before the store: fame, wholesale accounts, creator relationships, shelf space, capital. Ask whether the company is still healthy.

Then look at the storefront.

You can't copy a celebrity's audience or a century of shelf space. You can copy the habit of finding distribution before polishing infrastructure. Shopify says millions of businesses use it, so the till is much the same for everyone. If you're still choosing one, this comparison is where I'd start.

Your move: pick one brand from a list you've bookmarked and find out where its first 10,000 customers came from before you copy a single thing.

Shout out to all the legends I've ripped info from for this piece:

Goldman Sachs Alternatives | Shopify (Q2 2023 results) | Shopify (Q2 2026 announcement) | Heinz History Center | Mattel | General Atlantic | Forbes Australia | Allbirds 2025 annual report | Smartbird 10-Q | FashionUnited | Otago Daily Times | Wikipedia | Fudge