The Sidemoney Company
The Sidemoney Company
Overview
- Therum OS 2.0
- Counter storefront
- Product design
- Brand system
- Design system
- Port and launch
What We Did
The Outcome
An apparel store that runs on the studio’s own platform.
Sidemoney began as an idea, a movement centered on financial awareness, creative freedom, and the culture of making your own way. The challenge was to transform that mindset into a living brand system that could scale across digital, product, and social platforms while still feeling personal, local, and rooted in storytelling.
Sidemoney is a conversation about society and money, told through apparel. sidemoney.co is where it sells: five worlds under one wordmark, Mens, Womens, Playmoney, House Money and Accessories, plus the seasonal drops, Bird Season and Sixers Season, and the City Series that went exclusive at Foot Locker.
sidemoney.co is a custom build of Therum OS 2.0, the studio’s own platform: Node and Fastify, PostgreSQL through Prisma, Redis, Cloudflare in front. The composition reads as a sentence: Therum OS, plus Nexus for the connections, plus a Counter built for this store. Sidemoney is the platform’s first commercial deployment. Whatever a serious apparel brand asks of it gets answered here first, under real traffic, with real orders.
Before Therum OS, sidemoney.co ran on WordPress and WooCommerce, with the Moderno theme pushed past what most brands ever do with a theme, until the theme was the foundation and Sidemoney was everything you saw. Every plugin in that stack was one more thing to watch on update day and one more attack surface. The move onto the studio’s own platform kept the same brand with less platform tax.
Creative direction, brand development and digital execution.
Therum led the creative direction, brand development, and digital execution for Sidemoney. From shaping the visual identity and tone to developing the website and e-commerce experience, we built a full digital ecosystem that unified story, product, and experience.
The build started in the apparel landscape, not in a wireframe tool. The best DTC apparel shops have learned what big-box ecommerce still resists: product grids do not sell apparel. Mood and movement do. Wireframes were quick layout maps for home, about, contact, shop, product and search, each a decision about where the brand lives on that page, not just where the content sits.
One shelf every page draws from.
We approached the project like a cultural brand launch, not just designing visuals, but defining a language. Through iterative exploration and testing, we refined every touchpoint to feel intentional and connected. The brand system translated seamlessly into social media and campaign rollouts, giving Sidemoney a strong, recognizable foundation for growth.
Ink, paper, a royal blue for the City Series signage and a currency-gold accent. A display scale from Inter Tight, body at sixteen with room to breathe, a mono eyebrow. A twelve-column grid with a 24 pixel gutter. Seven page types: home, category, product, cart, checkout, about and contact. Every page pulls from this shelf, which is what lets the brand stay one piece across home, category, product and checkout.
Brand identity, the store, a social system and campaign visuals.
Complete brand identity and guidelines. Full web design and e-commerce build. A social media system and storytelling framework. Campaign visuals and brand collateral for future drops.
The marks: a sideways dollar cut seven times, one for each stream of income, beside the Sidemoney wordmark, with a signature drawn from check signatures.
Standing the store up on 2.0 ran under a port law written for the job. The reference site is truth: theme, layout and visuals are ported onto the platform, not redesigned, not approximated. If it is not on the reference or in the project folder it does not get created. Header, footer and the Counter templates are built once and reused. The store went through Therum OS 1.9.44 and then the 2.0 rebuild, and it no longer runs Moderno, but the studio’s own custom version of how it looked.
Measured, never eyeballed. Twelve pages at three breakpoints, every element carrying an id and compared against the reference: 2436 findings, then 285 with the markup ported, then zero. The layouts are carried over from the old site into the platform’s own components, so the page structure the brand had already earned is the page structure that ships.
Cards show stills. Hover reveals the gallery arrows, the quantity, the colour swatches and the sizes, and plays the product’s own video when it has one. A clustered product is one card: every colour is bound to its own flat shot, sizes sort smallest to largest everywhere, and retailer exclusives redirect to the retailer instead of a cart.
Buy now opens the checkout inside the card. Wallets first, Apple Pay and Google Pay, because they return the address themselves. Then contact and address, then the method strip and Pay. Cart and checkout are one session, minted on the first add to cart, prices never stored, totals computed live on every read.
The full checkout is the same method strip at page size: twenty methods in six groups, card, wallets, pay later, bank, crypto and peer to peer, each resolved to its first connected provider. Shipping is chosen at checkout, local pickup runs on named slots, and the receipt is guarded by the order’s own token. Customer accounts and order tracking run on the platform, not on a plugin.
The spot that ran while the store changed platforms. The storefront went live on 2.0 on 14 August 2026. A security audit came before it, on 9 August, and another followed on 23 August. A month of fixes from using the store for real shipped as beta.10 on 16 September.
The port. The reference site is truth. Nothing is invented.
The storefront. Counter: the card, and the checkout that happens inside it.
Cart, checkout, account. The transaction stays inside the brand to the last click.
The launch. Elevating our showroom.
Design system 1.0.
69 products, real orders, one platform.
69 products across the shop’s categories, clustered where a product has colourways. Categories, a blog, order tracking, customer accounts. The City Series at Foot Locker, threaded through the PLC Detroit programme in January 2025.
Same designer wrote the brief, did the build, and ships every deploy. Every layout decision is a brand decision, and the platform never negotiates with a vendor about its own voice.
The store runs on Therum OS 2.0, much faster and lighter than the stack it replaced. Catalogue, filtering, cart, checkout, customer accounts, order tracking, the blog and the editorial pages are platform features rather than extensions bolted on, which puts the feature set up against the ecommerce and CMS platforms a store would otherwise be renting.
The launch positioned Sidemoney as a credible, emerging streetwear brand with a unique perspective on culture and finance. The site and identity work became the backbone for multiple collaborations and campaigns, including the City Series, which merged apparel, storytelling, and real community engagement.
Brand as system. Platform as proof.
Most apparel stores inherit someone else’s assumptions about what a hero is, what a product page looks like and how a cart should feel. Sidemoney does not. The system decides, the platform carries it, and the store is where the platform proves itself under real orders.
What a serious apparel brand asks of the operating layer gets battle-tested here first. The next store starts from a platform, not from somebody else’s site.
This project represents Therum’s ability to help brands find their voice, not just through visuals, but through meaning. We don’t just design; we build stories that can scale, shaping brands that live and evolve across mediums while staying true to their origin.