HALO Waterfowl

HALO Waterfowl is a duck-hunting brand out of Carrollton, Georgia, born in 2013 and built on one of the strongest social followings in the space: 136K followers on Instagram. The brand had the audience. What it needed was merch in hand and a store that worked as hard as the feed does.

Store at halowaterfowlstore.com, relaunching with the brand's next drop.

The challenge

HALO's audience lives on Instagram, but the store didn't match the brand's reach. Sold-out products sat visible in the catalog, carts were abandoned with no follow-up, there was no review platform collecting social proof, and the About page didn't tell the story that built the following in the first place. On the merch side, the brand needed real product: shirts, tumblers, and headwear that live up to the logo.

They needed:

• Physical merch produced and delivered, not just mockups
• A Shopify storefront cleaned up and automated ahead of the store's August 2026 reopen
• Email automation working the audience the brand already owns
• A reviews platform capturing proof from a loyal customer base
• Brand storytelling that matches a decade-plus of history

What we produced

Real product, delivered.

• A 36-shirt DTF run of HALO tees
• 12 laser-engraved stainless tumblers
• An embroidered hat sample on the Richardson 112 trucker in brown and khaki, the first of a full headwear line

The play-by-play

The digital side, documented as it happened.

Before: a locked store

When we picked up the project, the storefront had been sitting behind a Shopify password wall for weeks. Every visitor, all 136K followers' worth of potential traffic, hit this page instead of a catalog.

Here's the part that proved the demand: while the store was locked, nine shoppers still found their way into checkout and left roughly $418 in abandoned carts, from Georgia to Norway. No recovery email ever went out, because none existed. People were trying to buy through a locked door.

The rebuild, behind the wall

While the wall was up we retooled the store so reopen day would be flip-a-switch simple:

• A Shopify Flow automation that hides sold-out products automatically, so the catalog never shows dead ends
• Catalog cleanup: inventory corrections, junk draft orders archived, sold-out sweep
• Abandoned-cart email automation, so the next $418 doesn't walk away
• Reviews platform installed and wired into product pages, with existing reviews moderated and imported
• The About page rewritten around the brand's real story
• A link-in-bio hub connecting the Instagram audience to the store

The proof on the product pages

The reviews came out of moderation at 54 reviews, every single one 5 stars. Verified buyers, on the page, doing the selling.

The story, told right

The About page went from an afterthought to the brand's actual history: the Camp brothers, built in Georgia, five owners including a country music star, and the Realtree Road Trips chapter.

The bridge from Instagram

One link in bio now routes the audience everywhere it needs to go: the store, the story, the email list.

August 5: the launch drill

With the retool done, we ran a full launch drill: password wall down, storefront verified public end to end, nothing sold out on the homepage because the automation had been keeping it clean the whole time. We also ran a live abandoned-cart test against the new email automation; the recovery workflows fired within minutes of the cart going idle. Then the wall went back up while the brand finishes counting inventory for the real drop. That's the point of the rebuild: opening is now a switch, not a project.

The Meta permissions gauntlet

One more boss fight. Connecting the store to Instagram Shopping should be two clicks, but the connect dialog just spun forever, no error, no clue. The real problem was invisible: the brand's Meta commerce assets, including a catalog of 61 already-approved products from an earlier chapter of the brand, were locked inside a former collaborator's Business Manager. That's what a decade of brand history looks like in practice: orphaned accounts and stale permissions nobody remembers.

We traced the dead spinner to the missing permission, figured out exactly which asset lived where, and walked the right people through the invite and assignment flow. Same day, the Instagram shop flipped to Active with all 61 products approved. No new Meta review, no weeks of support tickets, because the fix was knowing what to ask for.

The result

A store that's ready the moment the brand is: 54 five-star reviews on the product pages, an Instagram shop live again with 61 approved products, automations keeping the catalog clean, email working the audience the brand spent a decade building, and the next abandoned cart gets a follow-up instead of being forgotten. Production and digital shipped together, from one shop, which is the whole point of how we work.

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Merch · DTF apparel · Laser engraving · Embroidery · Richardson 112

Digital · Shopify · Shopify Flow · Email automation · Reviews platform

Store · halowaterfowlstore.com