Building a brand through images
Holly Jovenall on equestrian fashion, editorial design, and why your homepage should feel like a magazine spread.
February 2026 · 6 min read
Holly Jovenall doesn't think of herself as a tech person. She trained in fashion design, spent years around horses, and started All The Horses because she couldn't find equestrian clothing that felt truly considered — pieces that could move between a morning ride and a late lunch without apology.
We first noticed All The Horses because of their homepage. It doesn't look like a Shopify store. Images are tilted at slight angles, overlapping, creating the kind of depth you'd see in a printed lookbook or a gallery show invitation.
Holly builds that layout with Canvas. We sat down with her to talk about the brand, the design decisions behind it, and what it means to treat your storefront like a creative surface rather than a sales funnel.
Let's start at the beginning. What's the short version of how All The Horses came to exist?
I'd been around horses since I was young — riding competitively, spending weekends at the barn, all of it. And the clothing side of equestrian has always been oddly stuck. I wanted to make pieces that I'd actually want to wear outside the arena. Things that felt elevated. I kept waiting for someone to do it, and then at some point I realized I was that someone. So I started sketching, found a small production partner, and put up a Shopify store. That was about two years ago.
You clearly care a lot about how the brand looks. Where does that instinct come from?
I think it comes from the magazines I grew up looking at. My mom had stacks of Italian Vogue and Harper's Bazaar from the nineties. Those weren't selling you a dress — they were selling you a world. The images were composed, there was negative space, there was a feeling of air between the pictures. That's what I wanted for ATH.
How did you find Canvas? What were you using before?
Before Canvas, I was fighting my Shopify theme. I tried three or four different themes, and they all do the same thing — you get a grid. I tried a couple of page builders too. They're powerful, but they still think in rows and columns. I found Canvas through a Shopify community thread — someone mentioned it as a "freeform image layout tool" and I installed it that same day. The first time I dragged an image and rotated it a few degrees, I knew this was what I'd been looking for.
Walk us through how you actually design a homepage layout.
I usually start with the photographs. I'll pull selects from our most recent shoot — maybe twelve or fifteen images — and I lay them all out on my desk, literally print them and move them around. I'm looking for a rhythm. Once I have a composition I like, I open Canvas and start placing them. The whole thing takes maybe forty minutes. Then I switch to mobile view and adjust the stack.
The gaps are as important as the images. I want people to feel like they've opened a magazine, not clicked into a store.
You mentioned mobile. How do you think about it?
Most of our traffic is mobile. Something like seventy percent. What I love about Canvas is that the mobile layout is separate — I can rearrange everything for the phone without touching what I built for desktop. You lose some of the drama on a small screen, but you can keep the feeling.
Do your customers notice the design?
All the time. We get DMs that say "your site is so beautiful" or "this doesn't look like a Shopify store at all." A friend who works in fashion buying told me our homepage reminded her of a Celine campaign layout. But more practically, when the presentation is elevated, a $240 riding jacket feels worth it.
How does the editorial layout affect conversion?
Our time-on-page is unusually high for the homepage. People stay and explore. And our bounce rate dropped meaningfully when we moved from a traditional theme layout to the Canvas scatter. The layout creates curiosity — people lean in and want to discover. For a brand like ours, that slow discovery is more valuable than a fast "shop now" button.
What would you say to another brand founder thinking about trying an editorial layout?
Look at the brands you admire outside of Shopify. Go look at Jacquemus, or Aesop. None of them look like a default theme. Start small — put five or six images in Canvas, rotate a couple of them, create some overlap, and see how it feels. You'll know in about ten minutes whether it's right for your brand.
Are there Canvas features you use that people might not know about?
The hover effects are really nice. We use the "lift" hover on most of our images, so when someone hovers over a photo it lifts off the page slightly with a shadow. And for product shots, I use the "shop" hover which shows the product name and price. Oh, and the lightbox mode — if someone clicks a non-linked image, it opens fullscreen. I use that for detail shots of fabrics and stitching.
What's next for All The Horses?
We have a spring collection dropping in April. I'll be building a new Canvas layout for the launch, obviously. Beyond that, I've been thinking about doing a print lookbook. An actual physical magazine. The dream is to be the brand that makes you rethink what equestrian fashion can look like.
Visit All The Horses at allthehorses.co. If you're building a brand that cares about how things look, Canvas is free to start.