The Forme theme is a professionally designed Lightspeed eCom free site template for apparel businesses. Its structure and design elements are tailored to showcase clothing in the best possible way while creating an exceptional shopping experience.

In this guide, you'll learn which design best practices work best for apparel stores and how to customize the theme to reflect your brand while preserving the key design elements that make the site visually appealing and help drive sales.

Why the Forme theme works for your apparel business

The theme is designed to showcase clothing, footwear, and related accessories such as backpacks. It's suitable for both individual brands and retailers.

If you have your own brand, you can highlight collections, create curated product categories, and showcase bestsellers. If you're a retailer, you can feature multiple brands, organize products into categories, and display all your store locations to help drive foot traffic to your physical stores.

The Forme theme includes design elements that showcase clothing and footwear in the most appealing way:

Large vertical images — Your online storefront is designed for using large vertical images. That format is the best for showing human models wearing clothes, shoes, or accessories like backpacks. Seeing products on a model and being able to zoom in on high-quality images helps customers understand the fit, silhouette, details, and overall look. 

Wide product grid — Allows to show more items, while also giving space for large, detailed product images. That, combined with large images, makes it easier for customers to browse the catalog and compare styles. 

Minimal gap between product cards in the product grid — Narrow spacing helps create a premium, magazine-like feel and maximizes visual space for high-quality images. This encourages shoppers to scroll through more items and compare similar styles side-by-side. 

Color swatches — Color variations displayed beneath each product in the product grid let customers quickly understand all the available options. 

Enlarged product details page — When visitors click on a product, they open the product page with details. The theme supports an extra large product page layout that shows an expanded product gallery with images in their original sizes. That lets customers examine products from multiple angles and zoom in for important details, guiding them towards purchase. 

Easy navigation — Good navigation can turn visitors into customers by helping them find and save products they like. To achieve this goal, the theme has the search bar, the Favorites button, and links to key pages at the top menu. It also supports breadcrumbs that lead from a specific product to its category or subcategory. The footer with helpful links serves as a “map” for visitors who search for a particular thing. 

Horizontal filter bar above the product grid — A horizontal filter panel keeps more products visible on the screen, while also providing space for a list of filters to include. You can add not only Size and Color filters, but also include Brand, Style, Season, and other relevant filters. 

Wide site sections — High-quality imagery plays a key role in selling clothing online by creating an emotional connection and letting customers zoom in on product details. Wide site sections are designed to showcase large, detailed images that highlight your products and encourage browsing. 

Minimal color palette — Keeps the focus on products instead of the interface. 

Mobile-friendly layout — Preserves the browsing experience across devices. 

How to edit the Forme site theme 

Learning design best practices will help you to showcase clothing and footwear effectively. That includes preserving the theme's overall structure and key site elements designed specifically for apparel stores. Here’s what to keep in mind when editing the default design of the Forme theme: 

Keep the site rhythm 

Maintaining the right structure will help the site look good regardless of the content. The theme’s structure has a certain “rhythm”—it mixes large, visually rich sections with denser content, such as product grids, to create a natural visual flow. 

DO. Alternate visually contrasting sections. For example, a wide section with a single horizontal image can be followed by the product grid section with a lot of vertical images. Sections with different sizes, content type, or image orientation put together keep the site visually balanced and engaging, making people want to explore and scroll down, discovering more products. 

DON’T. Avoid placing similar sections next to each other, as this creates a repetitive, block-like layout that looks less professional. For example, placing together sections with a single horizontal image, or several text sections. 

Sections of different sizes and image orientations create visual rhythm 

Sections of the same size and image orientation create a visually monotonous layout 

Pay attention to product images 

The biggest challenge of selling clothing online is that customers can't touch or try on products. That's why product photos play a crucial role. 

Follow these best practices to showcase your products effectively: 

Use vertical product photos of high quality. Clothing is best presented in a vertical format. Horizontal images make your storefront look unprofessional and visually inconsistent. Upload images that remain sharp when zoomed in so customers need to examine product details. Low-quality or small images make products look less premium. 

Upload multiple images with close-up details. Show products from multiple angles to help customers understand what they're buying. Close-up photos highlight important details and help customers decide. 

Show models wearing products. Photos on a model help customers judge the fit, length, and silhouette. Including the model's height and the size they're wearing is also a best practice. The model/product should be centered and occupy approximately 70–85% of the image's height. 

Be consistent in photography style. Keep the main product photos in the catalog consistent: use the same framing, scale, and background. For example, make sure clothing occupies roughly the same amount of space in every image. All images should also use the same aspect ratio, such as 4:5, to create a clean, cohesive storefront. If you have images from different photo sets, you can unify them using the AI tool that removes background and can change the background color. 

Use high-quality images across the site

All images that you use on your site, as well as product photos, shape the impression of your brand and help customers imagine themselves wearing your products.The better your images, the stronger the emotional connection you can build with shoppers. 

To make your site look top-notch: 

Use high-quality lifestyle photography. Try to use at least 1000px size images. The larger the size is, the better. 

Keep a consistent visual style. Use similar lighting, colors, editing, and composition across all images to create a cohesive brand experience and make your storefront feel intentional and recognizable. You can use the AI tool to remove background on photos, making them more unified. 

Let the products be the focus. Avoid busy backgrounds and distracting props. 

Show people naturally. Use authentic poses and real-life situations instead of overly staged shots. 

Direct attention to the product. Position models so the clothing remains the focal point, without awkward crops or poses hiding key details. 

Use images for category covers. A category image ensures clear communication with customers and keeps your site's design consistent. You can upload an image for any category and subcategory of your site, using the most relevant image from the product gallery.

Images for the Men and Women categories

Help customers navigate on your site

Make it easy for customers to find and save products and quickly find relevant pages on your site. 

Here’s the checklist to follow when thinking your site’s structure through: 

• Place a section with products or categories as close to the top of the homepage as possible. 
• Showcasing your products right away is the best way to engage customers. Include only the most necessary links to your top menu navigation that lead to the key pages or site sections. 
• Don’t remove the Favorites button from the top of the site. It helps visitors quickly access products that they intend to buy. 
• Don’t turn off the breadcrumbs. They help customers quickly switch between products and categories while browsing different collections. 
• Use the button at the top of the product grid to show all products or your bestsellers. 
• Include all the links you find relevant to customers in your site’s footer. For example, you can list your social media, link to a section with your location, link to terms and conditions, and so on. 

Keep your color palette minimal 

The color palette of the site depends on your brand style, but it’s always best to use colors that don't distract customers from browsing products. 

DO. Try to stick to 2-4 key colors and use them throughout the site. You can change the color palette on your site and for specific sections. 

DON’T. Don’t use colors that do not complement each other, or too many colors since it may look overwhelming. You can use resources like Color Hunt, or any similar, to learn what colors compliment each other well. 

Add more sections and site pages 

You can add more sections and site pages to shape your site structure. It’s best to focus on your catalog on the home page and move supporting information to separate pages. This keeps visitors focused on your products and makes it easier for them to find info like your brand story, or delivery options that are located on separate pages. 

Here’s the list of pages or sections that you might find relevant to your brand: 

Legal pages. Displaying your terms of service, privacy policy, shipping and payment information, as well as the return policy, is vital when running an online business. You can add your terms of service to specific legal pages that customers can access from your site footer or any other link on your site. 

About us. The About Us page builds trust. It’s crucial for Ecommerce where people can’t try on clothes before buying. You can share your brand store, show the faces behind the clothes, and communicate your values. Best to add it as a separate page. 

Delivery, payments and returns. The most frequent questions that people want to ask when buying online—where you deliver to and when the order will arrive. Meet customers expectations by creating a page about delivery and returns where you cover all topics. If you offer several payment options, it’s also a good idea to add a dedicated Payment methods page. 

Contact us. Help people reach out to you by providing phone, email, or messengers where they can ask you questions. You can include the Contact Us section at the end of your home page, near to the Locations section. Alternatively, you can add both Contact Us and Locations sections to a separate page. 

Special offers. You can create a specific page where you will post information about current and upcoming sales. You can add the link to this page to the site header to make it more visible for site visitors.