Let us show you proven strategies to optimize your Shopify business:
Cart
Your cart is empty
Montana Knife Company makes superior knives, most of them designed for hunting. All their knives are manufactured, built, assembled, finished and sharpened in the U.S., with every bit of material possible sourced from within the country as well. Co-owned by Master Bladesmith and MKC President Josh Smith and Vice President Brandon Horoho, MKC has an ambition to grow into one of the biggest and most respected American-made brands. The business has already grown a ton since it started in 2020. They sell their products almost exclusively through their Shopify Online Store and have an uncommon supply constraint with their knives being out-of-stock most of the time due to high demand and limited supply. The company operates on a drop model, usually with one knife model being released each week on Thursday night at 7 p.m. Mountain Time. MKC’s site was built on a Shopify 1.0 theme. In 2023, the company found it was time to upgrade to a Shopify Online Store 2.0 theme.
One of the concerns they had was finding a reliable team who could handle the size of the project. MKC had 300-400 SKUs and nearly all of them had customized individual product pages. After listening to the Unofficial Shopify Podcast and seeing some of the websites we put together for our clients, Brandon says they knew our team would understand what they needed and would be able to accomplish what they were looking for. When we met with them, it confirmed we’d be the right fit.
We worked with MKC to design and develop a customized Shopify 2.0 theme to improve the shopping experience, reflect the high-end nature of their products, and help drive more sales.
For some companies, the site design needs to carry a heavier load to help make the product look great. But MKC had such a solid foundation with beautifully crafted products, great branding, and amazing photography. Our goal was to complement their outstanding content and create a cohesive experience, helping set the expectation for what their products feel like in the customer’s hands.
To give a bolder and higher-end feel with the design, we created color contrast throughout the site. We made the header a deep gray, contrasting it with white links and orange company logo. We color-blocked sections throughout the homepage, content pages, and product pages to make the site more visually interesting than if the entire page was white. We included details for polish like adding a thin white border to separate the black announcement bar from the gray header. The product detail pages (PDPs) have custom theme sections to call out some of the key features of the individual products (using some of MKC’s stellar product photography).
We made a number of improvements to create an easier shopping experience. We added collections for MKC’s knives that allow customers to filter and shop by pursuit type (e.g. bushcraft, big game, white tail, fin and feather, culinary). We made the navigation structure clear and more intuitive, making it easier to shop by the type of product a customer is looking for with better subcategories. We made in-stock products more visible by prominently featuring them in a section of the homepage directly below the header image.
We vastly improved how the site appears on mobile devices, designing it with a clean and easy-to-navigate mobile experience in mind. We also made shopping for a product variant a more seamless experience; previously MKC did not have variants listed on their PDPs.
We also created additional prompts to have the customer enter their email address to receive product drop and back-in-stock notifications, including a big call-to-action button on the PDPs on out-of-stock products.
We kept apps to a minimum, building most of the functionality directly into the theme, which has resulted in faster load times. The few select apps that we recommended and implemented offer meaningful improvements for the business:
Metafields are a powerful tool available with Shopify Online Store 2.0 themes. They allow merchants to personalize product pages with extra data fields, giving customers a better shopping experience and increasing the store’s visibility on search engines. We set up every PDP with metafields (e.g. use type, available colors, product specs) to enable faceted catalog filtering for customers on the front end of the site and for staff managing the catalog on the back end, and also to enable the PDP content to be generated dynamically. MKC appreciated how collaborative we were, how we worked quickly yet also accommodated delays they had on their side, as well as the support we provided in the 30 days after the early October site launch.
Throughout our work with MKC, we created screencasts to give them tips on using Online Store 2.0 features to help them self-service their site, which both Brandon and Mike found valuable in setting them up for success.
MKC’s growth has exploded. After a big revenue spike in August 2023, November then became their biggest month.
With high-revenue stores, one of the real game-changers is increasing the amount customers spend on their order. MKC’s cross-sell acceptance rates have seen notable improvement with the changes we’ve made to the site. In the 30-day post-launch period, 7.36% of orders included cross-sells powered by the Rebuy app, marking nearly a 10% increase in cross-sells for MKC.
Along with revenue, MKC is also seeing their email list grow substantially, potentially due to a combination of increased traffic to the site and the additional prompts we put on the site to sign up to be notified about future knife drops and product restocks. Brandon says the company has also been receiving a lot of compliments about the site and that it inspires confidence with people who interact with their brand.
Having metafields set up and the knowledge of how to work with them has also helped make updating the site easier and more efficient.
Both Mike and Brandon say they would recommend working with Ethercycle to others. MKC is already planning to work with us in the future as they grow further.