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MEN’S FITNESS · APPAREL & SUPPLEMENTS
Ancestral Brotherhood: a Shopify store and AI training program
A men’s fitness brand selling merch, supplements and editorial, built around an AI-driven training program: members answer for their goals, experience and equipment, and the system builds and adapts the programming from there.
Merch and supplements are the most crowded shelf there is.
A fitness brand competing on the product alone is competing against hundreds of brands selling a version of the same thing.
Apparel and supplements are both categories where the physical product is close to interchangeable. Two brands can sell the same protein and a similar shirt at a similar price, and the only thing separating them is why somebody would come back. Packaging and a discount code are not reasons. They are what you use when you do not have one.
The reason people come back is the programming
What actually holds a fitness audience is the training. That is the thing somebody engages with every day, and the thing they would miss if they left. So the decision on this project was to put the training program at the centre of the brand and sell the products around it, rather than bolting a free workout PDF onto a store as an email incentive.
The trouble with the PDF version is that it does not survive contact with a real person. A fixed twelve-week plan assumes an experience level the reader may not have and equipment they may not own, and it has no way of knowing which. Somebody training in a garage with two dumbbells gets handed a program written for a commercial gym, tries it twice, and stops. The failure gets read as a lack of discipline when it was a mismatch.
Three products, one storefront
The store also had three different jobs to do at once. Merch is sized and comes in variants. Supplements are consumed and bought again on a rhythm. Editorial has no cart at all and exists to be read. Those pull a storefront in three directions, and the build had to hold all three without turning into a general-purpose catalogue where nothing feels like it belongs to the brand.
The theme was written for the brand and deployed through GitHub, which means every change to the live store is a recorded, reviewable change rather than an edit somebody made in an admin panel that nobody can find again later.
A training program, and a storefront built around it.
The program is the product people stay for. The store is how the brand earns from them.
Members answer for their goals, their experience and the equipment they have, and the system builds the programming from those answers and adapts it from there.
Written for this brand rather than bought, and deployed through GitHub so every change to the live store is versioned and reversible.
Apparel sold in the storefront alongside everything else, in the brand’s own voice rather than a generic product grid.
The repeat-purchase half of the catalogue, sitting in the same store as the programming that gives people a reason to need it.
Written content in the same build, because a brand whose whole proposition is knowledge cannot only have product pages.
How the program adapts to the member.
Three questions decide the programming, and the answers keep mattering after the first session.
STEP 01
Answer for the goal
What somebody is training for changes the entire shape of a program. Asking first means the plan is aimed at their outcome rather than at an average one.
STEP 02
Answer for the experience
The same exercise prescribed to a beginner and to somebody with ten years behind them is two different instructions. Experience level is an input, not an assumption.
STEP 03
Answer for the equipment
This is the question static programs skip and the one that kills them. A plan built around a machine the member does not own is a plan they cannot follow.
STEP 04
The system builds the program
The answers produce the programming, so every member starts on something written for their situation instead of the same plan with their name at the top.
STEP 05
And keeps adapting it
The program is not a one-time export. It adapts from there, which is the difference between a plan somebody follows for a fortnight and one they stay on.
Custom builds start at $2,500.
A storefront is a project. Software like the training program is scoped on top of it.
Custom tooling is quoted separately from the store it lives in, and it is quoted before it is built. That way the build price and the software price are two numbers you can weigh against each other.
The services behind this build.
Every piece of it is something we do on its own as well.
— Start
What would make somebody come back to your brand?
If the honest answer is a discount, there is a better one worth building. Tell us what you sell.