Who Built the AQUON Website? Design and Shopify Development
AQUON, the hydration brand co-founded by cricketers Yuzvendra Chahal and Ishant Sharma, sells through its own Shopify store at drinkaquon.com. The website was designed and developed by ExactWhy, the Shopify agency founded by Parth Sojitra. This page sets out what we built, what the store is built on, and what other founders can take from it.
We are writing this because people keep asking us about the build, and because search results do not yet show who built the store. For the record: the design and the Shopify development of drinkaquon.com were both done by ExactWhy.
Who designed and who developed the AQUON website?
ExactWhy did both. One team, led by our founder Parth Sojitra, took the store from first layouts to a live Shopify storefront.
| Role | Who | What that covered |
|---|---|---|
| Website design | ExactWhy | Page layouts, the visual system across the store, how each section looks on mobile and desktop |
| Shopify development | ExactWhy | Custom theme sections, product and pack setup, turning the design into a working storefront |
| Brand | AQUON, marketed by Kiyas Lab | Product, formulation, pricing and launch |
Doing both in one team matters more than it sounds. On many launches, design and development sit with two different companies, and the gap between them is where launch weeks go wrong. On AQUON there was no handoff: the people designing each section were the people building it on Shopify, so every layout was designed with real product data, real prices and real phones in mind from the start.
If you are a founder looking at the AQUON store and wondering who to talk to about building something similar, the answer is one team: ExactWhy.
What is AQUON?
AQUON is a daily electrolyte drink mix sold as sachets. Yuzvendra Chahal and Ishant Sharma launched it in Gurugram on 13 July 2026. According to Indian Retailer's launch coverage, the brand is marketed by Delhi-based Kiyas Lab, a DPIIT-recognised startup, and manufactured at Sapiens Labs in Baddi, Himachal Pradesh.
Each serving carries five electrolytes (sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium and chloride), eight vitamins, 500 mg of taurine and 10 kcal. It comes in four flavours: Strawberry Watermelon, Exotic Blueberry, Lemon Lime and Tropical Punch.
The positioning matters for how the store was built. AQUON is not pitched as a niche sports product. Ishant Sharma described it at launch as combining electrolytes with a limited amount of sugar for everyday hydration, and the brand said it would sell first through its own D2C website. That makes the Shopify store the main shop window, not a side channel next to Amazon.
What is the AQUON store built on?
drinkaquon.com runs on a custom Shopify theme. The storefront sections that shoppers actually see were designed and developed specifically for AQUON, and they carry the brand's name in the code: AQUON hero banner, AQUON flavour hero, AQUON founders, AQUON ingredient cards, AQUON our products and AQUON PDP bundle.
A standard theme sits underneath only as the base layer, handling the plumbing every store needs: cart, search, navigation and accessibility basics. Everything that makes AQUON look like AQUON rather than a template is custom work, designed and built by us. That is where the effort went.
This is how we prefer to approach a launch with a fixed date. Rebuilding cart logic from scratch adds risk and no brand value. Building the brand's own sections properly, so the team can edit them without a developer, adds both.
Around the theme, the live store uses GoKwik for checkout, which is widely used by Indian D2C brands that take cash on delivery, and Judge.me for product reviews. Google Tag Manager and the Meta pixel handle tracking.
How is the storefront structured for a first-time buyer?
A launch store has one job: turn press and social attention into a first order. Most visitors arriving from a news story about two cricketers have never heard of an electrolyte sachet brand and do not know which flavour to try. The homepage walks them through that in order.
- What it is. The hero states the product and the formula in one line: 5 electrolytes, 8 vitamins, 10 kcal, for Indian heat, workouts, travel and everyday life.
- What to buy. The four flavours sit directly below with price, discount and an add to cart button. Each 24-sachet pack shows Rs 999 against a compare-at price of Rs 1,080.
- Why trust it. The founders section tells the story in the founders' terms: years of cricket, constant travel and Indian heat, and hydration products that were too sugary, too medicinal or too salty to drink every day.
- What is inside. The ingredient cards list each ingredient with its amount per serving and its share of the daily value.
The product page then offers pack sizes as one product: a pack of 1 at Rs 999, a pack of 2 at Rs 1,799 and a 3 + 1 pack at Rs 2,499. A glass bottle sits in the range at Rs 600 as an add-on. The prices here are as listed on the live store when we checked on 21 September 2026 and may change.
Why does the ingredient section matter so much for a wellness brand?
Because the buyer is putting it in their body every day, and "trust us" is not enough. The AQUON ingredient cards take each ingredient, show the amount per serving and explain why it is there. Sodium, for example, is listed at 371.8 mg per serving from Himalayan pink salt, with its daily value and its purpose.
From a development point of view, this is the kind of section that has to be built properly rather than typed into a page as text. The information changes when a formulation changes, it has to read cleanly on a phone, and it has to be editable by the brand team without calling a developer. A section built with proper settings in the theme editor gives them that.
It also does a quieter job for search. Clearly structured, specific information about what a product contains is exactly the kind of content that search engines and AI assistants can read and quote accurately. Vague marketing copy gets skipped.
Why did one team handle both design and development?
Because the parts that break launches are exactly the parts that sit between design and development, and one team removes that gap.
Every designed section needs to exist as something the brand can edit. Every product needs its variants, prices and compare-at prices to match the design's assumptions. Every layout has to survive a long flavour name, a sold-out state and a small Android screen. None of those show up in a static design file, and all of them show up on launch day. Designing and building in the same team meant those questions were answered while the design was still being drawn, not in the final week.
We have written a longer piece on celebrity-led D2C launches on Shopify, including what tends to go wrong, in our guide to celebrity D2C brands on Shopify.
Why does it matter who built a brand's website?
If you are a founder hiring for your own launch, the credits on a site you admire are a shortcut to the right people. But a single footer line rarely tells the whole story, because many D2C stores are built by more than one team.
When you look at a store you like, ask two separate questions. Who designed it, meaning who decided how it looks, reads and feels? And who developed it, meaning who made that design work on Shopify with real products, real prices and real checkout rules? The answers are often different companies, and you may need both.
It also changes what you should ask each of them. A designer can show you mood boards, layouts and how they think about a brand. A Shopify developer should be able to show you live stores, explain how their sections are edited in the theme editor, and tell you what happens on launch day when traffic arrives from a news story. For AQUON, both answers are the same team, which is why one conversation with us covers the whole build.
What can other founders take from the AQUON build?
Four things stand out that apply well beyond hydration.
- Treat your own store as the main channel if the press is pointing at it. AQUON's coverage sent readers to its D2C website. The store had to be ready to sell on day one, not just exist.
- Spend custom development where the brand lives. Base theme for the plumbing, custom sections for the story, the formula and the founders.
- Make pack sizes easy to compare. One product with clear pack options beats five separate listings that make a buyer do arithmetic.
- Put the label on the page. For anything people eat or drink, the ingredient detail is not a footnote. It is part of the sale.
If you want to see how we approach product pages in general, our breakdown of Shopify product page design covers the patterns that tend to convert on mobile.
Where can I see the store and our other work?
The live store is at drinkaquon.com. Our other Shopify builds are on our portfolio page.
If you are launching a D2C brand, we can take it from first layouts to a live Shopify store, or build from designs you already have. Send us your product list and launch date and we will tell you honestly what is realistic to build in the time you have.