Planning creative for your Shopify or DTC store

If you run a Shopify or other DTC store, your growth depends on a steady stream of ad creative that actually converts. ATIYO is where you plan that creative — turning what you know about your products and customers into briefs, a production pipeline, and a record of what wins. This guide shows how to set up that flow for an ecommerce brand.

Start with your customers, not your products

The brands that scale creative fastest brief around the customer's desire, not the product's features. Set up your Brand Bible with that in mind:

• Avatars — the distinct types of people who buy your product.
• Sub-avatars — meaningful segments within an avatar (a gift-buyer versus a self-buyer, for example).
• Core desires — the deeper want each avatar is really trying to satisfy.
• Angles — the specific messaging approaches that speak to those desires.
• Ad types — the formats you run, from UGC testimonials to founder stories.

If you already have this in a spreadsheet, you can bulk import it — see importing your data into ATIYO with Excel or CSV.

Turn products into briefs

For each hero product or offer, create briefs that pair a customer avatar with an angle. A single product usually deserves several briefs — one per avatar-and-angle combination you want to test.

1. Open create a brief.
2. Pick the avatar and core desire you're speaking to.
3. Choose a hook and marketing angle that fits your product's promise.
4. Set the awareness level and funnel stage — a cold-audience prospecting ad reads very differently from a retargeting one.
5. Add a promo if there's an offer, plus any inspiration link or reference.
6. Save the brief so it's ready to hand to an editor.

Run a production pipeline

The Creative Roadmap is your board for keeping ideas moving. Each creative flows through statuses so nothing stalls in someone's inbox.

1. Add new concepts as 'planned' or 'needs brief'.
2. Assign an owner and a due date so production has a deadline.
3. Move cards to 'working', then 'ready to test' as editors deliver.
4. Mark creatives 'testing' when they go live in your ad platform.
5. Flag the standouts as 'winner' and archive the rest.

For a busy store, run separate named roadmaps — for example one per product line or per season — so your board never becomes a wall of unrelated cards.

Review cuts before they go live

As editors deliver, collect the files in the Vault. Reviewers leave comments with a video timecode, so feedback like 'tighten this hook' lands on the exact second it refers to. Resolve comments as they're addressed and keep versions so you always know which cut is final.

Fitting creative to your store's calendar

DTC demand swings with the calendar, and your creative planning should run ahead of it. Use awareness level, funnel stage, and promo fields on your briefs to line creative up with what your store is doing:

• Seasonal pushes — brief promo-led creative weeks before a sale so cuts are reviewed and ready, not scrambled together the night before.
• New product launches — start with problem-aware and solution-aware angles for cold audiences who don't know the product yet.
• Evergreen offers — keep a steady rotation of unaware and product-aware creative testing in the background year-round.

Because ATIYO doesn't touch your store, none of this depends on inventory or catalog syncs — you're simply planning the creative that will run against whatever your store is promoting.

Learn and scale what works

When a creative wins in your ad manager, mark it a winner in ATIYO. Over time, Insights shows your win rate and which angles and avatars produce the most winners. That's the signal that tells you where to double down for your store's next batch.

Next steps

Set up your Brand Bible, write your first grid of briefs, and put them on the Roadmap. To see how all these pieces connect, read how ATIYO fits into your creative workflow.