A new store for a brand founded in 1950
Admiral Outdoor makes commercial-grade outdoor furniture and umbrellas for hotels, country clubs, communities and public spaces, handcrafted in America since 1950. In 2025 the company came under Campania International (another Text Connects client) and was relaunched as Admiral Outdoor in Spring 2026.
Text Connects built the new Shopify store from the ground up, starting in October 2025 with an SEO audit of the old site and launching in April 2026. Most buyers are trade customers, so prices stay hidden until an approved account logs in, and account-level pricing and volume discounts apply automatically.
More combinations than variants can handle
Almost every Admiral piece can be ordered in a long list of frame finishes, cushion fabrics, sling fabrics, umbrella fabrics and add-ons. Shopify now allows up to 2,048 variants per product, but still only three options, and the combinations multiply fast. Building every one as a variant would have meant products the team couldn’t realistically manage, with the same fabric repeated across every product that uses it.
So we stopped treating colors as variants:
- Every fabric and finish is a metaobject, with its swatch, price tier and grade, shared across every product that uses it.
- Add-ons are their own products, linked to each piece and added to the cart alongside it. A Shopify Function bundles them back together at the right total.
- Swatch lists load as you go, so a product with more than 50 colors still opens quickly.
- A custom data app keeps it all in order. The Admiral Product Data Manager handles bulk CSV updates for products and swatches and syncs images from Dropbox and Amazon S3, so the team updates the catalog in one place.
The umbrella builder
Commercial umbrellas are built to order, and the builder lets buyers spec one the way a sales rep would: frame finish, canopy fabric, lift type, finial and finial finish, then add-ons like venting, valance, trim, underside canopy, fringe, increased pole length and a printed logo, uploaded right on the product page. The price updates as options are picked. Anything that needs a custom quote, like a non-stock fabric, is flagged as a quoted item instead of guessed at.
Quotes, built into the customer account
Large commercial orders rarely go straight to checkout. In August 2026 we launched a quoting system for Admiral’s trade accounts:
- Checkout becomes a quote. When a business customer checks out, Shopify creates a draft order for the sales team instead of a finished order.
- Quotes live in the customer account. Buyers see each quote by name and status (open, submitted, completed, expired) and can request changes with comments.
- The right rep hears about it. Comments email the sales reps assigned to that company, with a button straight to the quote in Shopify, and replies go back to the customer.
- Staff can build quotes too, adding color-configured furniture and umbrellas to a draft order from the Shopify admin.
It’s built with Shopify’s customer account extensions, admin extensions and draft orders, backed by the same Admiral data app.
