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Perrin Performance is a high performance automotive parts manufacturer based in Hillsboro, Oregon and specializing mostly in parts for turbo charged cars and some compact models. About 90% of the company’s business is Subaru performance parts, distributed both wholesale and retail. Adam Taft launched the company in 1996, selling import performance parts out of his parents’ garage; now Perrin operates out of a 25,000-square-foot facility in Oregon.
Perrin’s previous website was built on an outdated platform that required constant developer involvement. That was “huge pain,” says John Herring, Perrin’s digital strategy lead, as developers for the older platform were becoming increasingly difficult to find. And the user experience was badly in need of an update.
In search of a more modern site experience for users, Perrin selected Ethercycle, in part because they wanted to work with a web development firm that would welcome a collaborative approach to building the new site.
“We were specifically looking for more someone to partner with, rather than just someone to do the work, as it little bit of a scary leap for us, because we were completely changing platforms and also changing the way our catalog was set up, so it was going to have to be somebody who we could work with pretty closely. We chose each Ethercycle mostly because they demonstrated in our pre-interview that they were clearly Shopify experts who understood how to use the platform and could create the same vision that we were looking at like we walked away from even the first conversation, and we're like, okay, yeah, that guy gets it.”
Tom and Kurt worked to migrate Perrin’s catalog to Shopify, and created a custom theme that would create an easier search and filtering experience for the user, and make it easy for customers to find products related to the item they searched for.
The new design accentuates Perrin’s red-and-black branding and includes a custom gallery that includes large images of products, rather than the default thumbnails as well as a variant image swapper that makes it easier for customers to view products in different colors.
Kurt and Tom also added an app that allows Perrin to offer a discount for military service members with minimal work on Perrin’s end—something John describes as a wish-list item the company had wanted to do for a long time, but had not managed to implement.
Throughout the process, team members at Ethercycle and Perrin were in constant communication, with weekly meetings and regular email and phone conversations about the progress.
Kurt and Tom responded quickly to questions or suggested changes, and provided screen recordings Perrin’s team could reference when they needed to do things they’d never done before, and that they could reference in the future.
The launch was also “the smoothest web launch we’ve ever had,” John says.
“The biggest change actually is [the new site] allows us to manage our website with a team of two, and allows us to get things done at a very high rate of speed—like really fast. We can make changes to the site right away, or at least identify whether or not we need to bring someone in like Kurt to help us with the change. In the past, it was more of us describing what we wanted to a developer who would then disappear for two weeks and then come back and go, ‘Look what I've done,’ and [we’d] be like, ‘Nope, that's not what I was asking for’...We'd always end up sort of settling for something and not actually getting the thing that we wanted. This has relieved all of that stress for us, and just made it faster and easier for us to be able to do it with fewer people.”
Perrin’s year over year sales are up 15% on Shopify versus their former platform. In the 60 days since launching the site, Perrin’s ROI on the migration is 7.5x.