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Asutra
Asutra is a Chicago-based company that promotes active self-care, offering natural and organic products to improve sleep, boost mood, relieve pain, and care for skin. Tennis champion Venus Williams loved Asutra's products so much that she joined this women-owned, women-led company as part owner and Chief Brand Officer.
The company’s site had undergone a redesign in 2019. After five years, Senior Marketing Manager Clare Rooney says it was time to overhaul and modernize the site to improve the customer experience, particularly on mobile devices, and avoid unnecessarily losing people who landed on the site.
“A lot of our traffic was coming through for mobile and we knew that the site experience wasn't as great as it could be. We also wanted to make the shopping experience as streamlined as possible so you're able to find whatever you need on our website a bit more easily.”
Director Kate Gilligan says that Asutra had diversified its retail presence quite a bit over the years and also made a lot of optimizations on its Amazon storefront.
“As we learned a lot about our customers, whether they shop on our site or in any one of those other places, we wanted to make sure that we were meeting their needs and that what they see when they come to the site reinforces the brand experience.”
Asutra partnered with design/brand agency Martian Arts to craft the redesign and partnered with Ethercycle to handle the development. We’ve worked with Asutra for years to help them maintain, update, and support their custom Shopify theme, so they knew they would be in good hands with us.
Building a highly customized Shopify theme to execute a stunning design
With the provided designs for core site pages in hand, we got down to selecting a Shopify theme and doing a ton of custom building to execute the design for the current site pages and create templates for future pages. We carried the design through other site pages that weren’t included in the designs provided by the agency, ensuring a unified aesthetic throughout the site to tell a consistent brand story.
On the homepage, some of the delightful details we built include elegant animation effects as you scroll down the page. We came up with creative solutions to achieve the original designed look, such as having products appear to break the grid and overlap over the edge of a section.
On the product detail pages (PDPs), there was a need to pack in a lot of information (e.g. how-to-guides, deeper dives on key ingredients, product comparison tables, products frequently bought together, customer reviews, etc.) without overwhelming the customer or requiring them to scroll excessively to make a purchase. Asutra reworked some of their copy to shorten it and we created a unique product form that sticks on the right side of the screen on desktop while the customer scrolls through the rest of the sections that go into additional product details. On mobile, we created a sticky add-to-cart button to achieve a similar effect. Both desktop and mobile have quick buy options (Shop Pay, Amazon Prime) listed below add-to-cart.
“There was a focus on making sure that we got all of the vital information above the fold, whether that's on mobile or on desktop, and making that shopping experience super easy. You can find everything that you need on that page now and people have the CTA buttons a little bit closer to them and are able to make decisions easily.”
Special collection pages were designed to help tell a full story of how Asutra products can help with sleep, pain relief and skin care. We created a flexible template that features a combination of text, images, product listings and videos. The sections are customizable and we made it easy for the Asutra team to be able to swap content in and out and move sections as needed. Having the types of content mixed together offers an engaging experience on desktop, but on a smaller screen it can interrupt the shopping experience, so we created a separate mobile layout that groups the content by type.
The new site features a lot more video content, particularly on the product and special collection pages, allowing Asutra to adopt more of a multimedia approach for their shopping experience.
“I think that's how people are used to shopping and consuming content now, especially on their mobile devices. If you're going to get them to read, you most likely have to catch their attention through something else first. And now we have this as opposed to paragraphs of prose that might have been really nicely done, but were just too much and not going to be digested.”
Other elements that we implemented include a new mega menu to help customers easily navigate the site and a pop-up form to collect the customer’s email when they click the banner bar to sign up and get 15% off their first order.
Improved customer experience, with early increases to add-to-cart, reached checkout, and conversion rates
We launched October 1, 2024. The new site is gorgeous and delivers a modern ecommerce experience on both desktop and mobile that is in line with how customers shop online.
“The most important copy is easy to see right off the bat by anyone who's shopping or even just information gathering and all the additional detail is exactly where you would expect it to be. All of that is just a much better user experience.”
“It's been awesome to be able to share the new website in direct emails and on social media, as well as with our partners. Our Google Ads team was so impressed by it. We've gotten great feedback back on it. It's exciting for us.”
The improvement in customer experience appears to have had an immediate impact. Asutra saw significant increases in several key metrics within a month of launching.
Month-over-month (October 2024 compared to September 2024) improvements include:
📈add-to-cart rate increasing by 13%
📈reached checkout rate increasing by 24%
📈conversion rate increasing by 3%
Year-over-year (October 2024 compared to October 2023) improvements include:
📈add-to-cart rate increasing by 168%
📈reached checkout rate increasing by 171%
📈conversion rate increasing by 94%
As much as Asutra loves working with us, the team doesn’t want to have to engage us every time they need to make changes to the website. Like many merchants, they want the flexibility and ability to manage the site themselves, which we helped provide.
“Ethercycle made everything very customizable in terms of different sections that we could add and get rid of, so that we would be able to have control over what things looked like in the future as things change. I really appreciate the time that they take to ensure that we understand what they've put together in the back end and how to edit things.”
“Previously, the way we were managing certain things was just very cumbersome on the back end of Shopify because it was an old setup. It's so much nicer for us now.”
We’ve been privileged to work with Asutra for many years and to have them consider us as an extension of their team.
“We can't say enough good things about Ethercycle. They are people that we trust through their many years of giving fantastic advice. They’re easy to reach. They are ready to optimize. They come with solutions and have just been exceptional partners for us.”
Our Work Together
Ethercycle helped Asutra:
- Execute a gorgeous design with a highly customized Shopify Online Store 2.0 theme to deliver a more modern, streamlined and optimized shopping experience.
- Improve add-to-cart rate (up 13% month-over-month and 168% year-over-year).
- Improve reached checkout rate (up 24% month-over-month and 171% year-over-year).
- Improve conversion rate (up 3% month-over-month and 94% year-over-year).
- More easily self-manage updates and changes to their site.
“We deeply rely on Ethercycle for the team’s expertise, but also for their partnership and positivity. Instead of them saying ’this is broken’, it’s always a positive interaction about what is great, what could be better, and how we're going to do that together. And I just think you cannot put a price on working with a super positive, supporting, and motivating partner.”