Over the past months, the agile Out of the Sandbox team has been flexing its creative and technical muscles hard to bring Shopify store owners and developers a revolutionary new Shopify theme.
Now, we’re excited to introduce you to the result of all that hard work — and open up a whole new set of possibilities to stretch your creativity.
It’s called Flex — and it’s the newest premium Shopify theme available exclusively through the Out of the Sandbox website.
Flex is designed to be exactly what it sounds like — super flexible.
Flex represents years of feedback from Shopify store owners and developers of all types who want more flexibility and control when it comes to Shopify themes.
Feature overview
The real power of Flex becomes obvious once you click that indigo “customize” button and start exploring all of the options available.
By the way, before we get started on the top features, keep in mind that Flex, like all other Out of the Sandbox Shopify themes, comes bundled with the foundation of every Shopify theme:
- Fully compatible with the latest Shopify features and requirements.
- Supports sections on the homepage as well as page.details and product.details templates.
- Designed and developed by the same team who has created our best selling themes sold in the Shopify theme store — as well as our previous game-changing theme, Turbo.
- Will be updated to be compatible with new Shopify theme requirements as they become available (more on that in a bit).
Here’s a roundup of some of the highlights of the Flex Shopify theme:
- Advanced mega menus without an app: We know that mega menus are a key way to not only to “show” your shoppers around the store but also get out your marketing messages — so we’ve expanded the mega menu functionality in our other themes to create our most flexible setup yet.
- Fine-tuned layout options of each section: We’ve added settings for width, spacing, animation, and more to sections.
- Header layout options: Select from a variety of preset header options, including one with a prominent search box, centered navigation flanking your logo or store name and even a vertical header.
- Footer layout options: Likewise, pick from several footer layout options, including one with a large promotional image and text and a clean and simple centered design.
- Default product templates: Decide a default product page layout, including the traditional one. Alternatives include one with continuous scrolling and one that uses sections. You can still use other templates on a product-by-product basis, too.
- Expanded sections options on product pages: You can decide the order and placement of your product page sections now — instead of just putting all sections under the product information.
- Icons: Expanding upon the introduction of shapes in Artisan, we’ve added more options throughout the theme to add imagery without any design work. Leverage our icon library and use them in a variety of places.
- More content areas: In addition to sections, Flex also offers a promotional banner with expanded options, including width, a sticky option, and the ability to include an icon or let users close it. Your footer can also have up to six icons with text labels. There’s also another header area to showcase your tagline, phone number or other important information.
- Better button control: Create different looks for different buttons, including size, color, shape, corners, hover options and more.
- “Add to cart” animation: Give shoppers a nod that the item is in their cart with an animated checkmark.
- Cart options: Flex includes both the popular drawer and minicart formats introduced in other Out of the Sandbox Shopify themes as well as more traditional options.
- Expanded image options: Some sections allow you to enable image cropping to keep sizes consistent, add a background overlay in your choice of color and transparency and adjust the border-radius on images — without opening an image editing program.
- Custom inline CSS and class names: If you’re a CSS pro, you’ll love the ability to give each section a unique class name or insert inline CSS to fine-tune the look and feel of each section.
By the way, if you want to compare Flex to Turbo, we've got a handy breakdown for you here.
How to get it
Like our Turbo Shopify theme, Flex is available exclusively on the Out of the Sandbox website. Flex is not available in the Shopify theme store.
However, you can still buy with confidence. Flex is designed, developed and tested by the same great team behind all of Out of the Sandbox’s ever-popular and award-winning Shopify themes.
All of our themes, including Turbo and Flex, meet or exceed Shopify’s guidelines for theme development and are updated to comply with any new Shopify requirements regularly.
The future of Flex
As you might know, Shopify is planning some significant updates to how Shopify themes work and function later this year.
Out of the Sandbox will be working closely with Shopify to update all of our Shopify themes, including Flex, to be fully compatible with these features.
There will be no additional fee to download the updated theme once these new features are available.
This is only the beginning
Finally, as you start using Flex, don’t forget that this is version 1.0 only — so you might say we’re only in the warm-up phase of pushing Shopify theme flexibility.
We’re already hard at work on a series of updates that will be released to bring even more features and functionality to this theme.
