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Shopify Brooklyn theme complete review - 2022 Update

Shopify Brooklyn theme complete review - 2022 Update

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Brooklyn is an excellent free Shopify theme. If you land here after searching keywords “Shopify Brooklyn theme review,” you have come to the right place.

In this article, we will give you insight into Brooklyn themes as well as answer your most burning question: “Is Brooklyn theme a perfect fit for your Shopify store?”

Let’s find out!

What is the Shopify Brooklyn theme

Brooklyn is a free Shopify theme tailored for apparel and fashion stores. It’s elegant, simple, and can focus customer attention on your products. Like many other Shopify themes, Brooklyn comes with two versions:

  • Classic
  • Playful

With the same design style, the only difference between the two versions is that Classic offers you one more Featured Collection to show along with the feature product section shown right on the home page.

While Playful has a different blog section and just one Featured collection only, it’s more suitable for stores with few products.

Shopify Brooklyn Playful presets

Despite the theme's intent for apparel and fashion stores, you can use this theme for any niche.


Where to get the Shopify Brooklyn theme?

You can get the Brooklyn theme in 2 ways:

  1. In the Shopify theme store.
  1. In the Theme Library feature in Shopify Admin

Go to Online Store > Themes > Theme library > Explore Free Theme > Find Brooklyn theme.

Download Brooklyn free Themes

Brooklyn theme main features

What makes the Brooklyn themes stand out from other free Shopify stores:

- Built for an apparel store: conveying the beauty and style of the products is the most important for a fashion, clothing store. That's why Shopify makes Brooklyn's product page support a large and clear showcase of the product's image.

- Header slideshow: it helps you showcase multiple products or has a few strong hero images at the top of the homepage. Moreover, Brooklyn can make the slideshow run automatically without any action.

- Dynamic product grid: change the layout of your collection page based on how many items are displayed. It means the theme will automatically adjust the spacing and layout between product images to fit with the screen and look good.

Brooklyn different layout base on how many product shown

- Slide-out cart: help customers add multiple products to their cart without leaving their current pages. You don’t have to go back and forth between purchases. Quite convenient features for customers and further enhance their shopping experience.

Slide out card features in Shopify Brooklyn theme

- Home page video: you can embed a Youtube or Vimeo format video in your front store to help you catch your visitor's attention.

Theme Setting review

Each theme has a different theme setting. Let’s see what's in for the Brooklyn theme.

Brooklyn theme setting

- Colors: The themes offer just enough options to manage the theme's color effectively, but nothing special here.

- Typography: The themes offer you three system fonts: Sans Serif, Serif, and Mono, and also support other fonts. However, Shopify suggests you choose system font to increase loading speed on the customer side.

- Cart type: You can choose which cart page type will show after the customer clicks the “Add to Cart” button in this setting. There are two options: Page and Drawers.

"Drawers" is the slide-out cart feature we have talked about in the main features.

- Social media: Enable you to show the icons to link with the following social media: Facebook, Twitters, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, Google Plus, Tumblr, Youtube, Vimeo, Fancy

- Favicon: Change the favicon logo of the website. Small but convenient for basic Shopify users who aren't tech-savvy.

- Checkout: Enable you to change the layout design of the checkout page.

- Theme Style: switch between Classic and Playful theme

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Other essential factors review

Mobile compatibility

When checking the mobile version in the demo, you can see Brooklyn themes support mobile design nicely. However, there are complaints about being no image option for mobile and desktop separately, and you have to custom code this feature.


Speed

For speed, we check this demo Shopify Brooklyn store: https://brooklyn-theme.myshopify.com/ in Page Speed Insight tool and GTMetric.

While PSI gives this website an excellent grade in desktop performance: 95 (71 on mobile), GTMetric gives a B in performance, indicating that the website needs to work on speed index metric. (how quickly are the content of your page are visibly populated)

Shopify Brooklyn theme speed check in GT metric


Apps compatible

It works great with many popular apps in Shopify, such as Product Filter & Search, Recharge, Judge.me, Also brought , ect since it is one of the most used themes.

Brooklyns work seamlessly with Product Fitler & Search

Brooklyn Theme works seamlessly with many apps


Customer review on Shopify Brooklyn theme

Until now (Dec 2021), there are over 84 reviews on the Shopify themes store, and 70% are positive reviews. We will recap all of the good and bad reviews to save time reading.

Good reviews: mainly focus on how the design looks simple & clean, doesn’t need much customization, and offers enough features for a basic online store.

Good review for Brooklyn theme

Bad reviews: related to minor bugs mostly, nothing stands out, and all of those are avoidable.

bad reviews for Shopify Brooklyn theme

Example stores using Brooklyn theme

You can check this website for inspiration when building your store using the Brooklyn theme.

Some great store using Brooklyn theme we have find so far:

undercoverwaterwear.com

Example store using Brooklyn theme #1

modestpop.com

Example store using Brooklyn theme #2

zootzi.com

Example store using Brooklyn theme #3

Why should you use Shopify Brooklyn theme?

There are several reasons why you choose this theme for your Shopify business.

  1. It’s Free. For a small business with few products, a free theme would help save you so much money but still offer enough features to help you do great with your store.
  1. The design is excellent for a free theme. Brooklyn will bring you a modern, elegant look.
  1. It’s easy to customize. Anyone can use this theme, even new Shopify users, after spending a few minutes reading the documentation.

Some tips to best use Brooklyn theme

The best size to display products and slider images in Brooklyn theme

In any store, a high-resolution image with small size data is what we aim for. To do that, you need to know the ideal size of the image.

- For product image: the image size should be at least 1024 x 1024px and flat color background to fit with the minimalism style of the themes

- For slider image: the image in both of the demo was shown at 1200 x 800px. The main content of the image should be placed in the center for better display on both mobile and desktop screens.

Add a sale badge to the products.

Notice the small badge indicating how much the product is on sale in the demo?

Thankfully, it isn’t limited only to the demo, or you need some code to display. All you need to do for that badge to appear is:

Go to product details and set compared at a price greater than the regular price.

Set compare at price to show sale badge in Shopify Brooklyn

Set which products appear larger on the collection page

The products shown on the collection page appear larger or smaller depending on the order of the products arranged in the backend. Therefore, you have total control over it. You can set the looking or best-selling item in the large image to increase customer purchase.

To sort the order of the product, you can follow these steps:

  • Step 1: In Shopify Admin, go to Products. > Collection
  • Step 2: Choose the Collection you want to edit
  • Step 3: In the Product section, change the Soft option to Manually and rearrange the order or the products you want.

Sort product in collection

For every six products, the 1st product and the 6th product have large images. For example, the first, sixth, seventh, 12th, 13th, and 18th images in the collection have large images:

Demo product layouts in Shopify Brooklyn theme

(Source: Shopify)
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Final words

Brooklyn theme is an excellent theme to start, especially if you are doing business in the apparel and fashion industry. It’s free, has a great design, and is easy to work with. It has some setbacks as being not fully mobile supported. However, it is not a big deal.

The stand-out function of the Brooklyn theme is the ability to enable you to show video and slider on the homepage, an advantage when promoting your products.

We hope after this article, you will have complete insight into this theme and decide whether to use the theme or not. If you are looking to hire a Shopify developer to help you with your business, you can use the Shopify developer test to find the best developers.

If you have any questions about this article, please let us know through our media channel.

Subscribe to our email or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Linkedin now for more valuable Shopify news, tutorials, as well as eCommerce’s growth, hacks to boost your business.

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Boost Commerce is a technology company helping more than 11,000 Online Stores Across 80+ Countries grow sales with Shopify Advanced Filter and Search app.

Author

Hayden Luu
Digital Marketer
Hayden is a Digital Marketer at Boost Commerce. He is doing all sorts of things at Boost, including running ads and writing tech content. Also, he can watch football all day if he’s allowed to.
Hayden is a Digital Marketer at Boost Commerce. He is doing all sorts of things at Boost, including running ads and writing tech content. Also, he can watch football all day if he’s allowed to.