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Condition 1
An American Manufacturer Sees Direct-to-Consumer Success
Condition 1 is the retail division of Royal Case Company, a 40-year-old Texas-based manufacturer of custom hard cases and soft sewn bags. Condition 1 offers the highest quality airtight and watertight hard cases at an affordable price. All their cases are IP67 rated waterproof and dustproof to protect against the elements and their injection molded CN-1 resin is formulated to be lightweight but virtually indestructible
Though Condition 1’s sales through Amazon were very strong, Marketing Director Dayton Daft says the direct-to-consumer website suffered from a lack of attention.
“It was an afterthought. It was on a very old Shopify theme, had tons of bugs on mobile, was super limited in configuration, and was tough to navigate. Ultimately it just was a horrible representation of the brand and the consumer shopping experience was terrible.”
Having a professional and easy-to-use website is table stakes in the DTC market. Improving the customer shopping experience was a high priority for Dayton.
Dayton was familiar with Ethercycle’s work through listening to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast and had seen some of the great results we’d helped other brands achieve, so he reached out to us to help.
“Jumping into a new project and working with a new team, there's always that hesitation of how you're going to collaborate or work together. But after my first discovery call with Ethercycle, it was pretty obvious that I was going to jibe well with the team.”
Improving the customer experience through custom theme design and development
We started the project by establishing all the pain points that needed to be addressed and setting out a clear project plan for the site design and development.
We collaborated closely with Dayton as we created mockups for the new site and established a design language that would be in keeping with Condition 1’s branding. This included creating custom icon sets to serve as trust badges showing important and unique features of their products.
One of the improvements we made to the customer shopping experience was changing how product variants are handled and displayed. Previously product variants such as a foam insert or color options were handled as a separate product; each SKU had its own individual product detail page. Not only did this make the shopping experience more cumbersome, it also created repeat work and a lot of frustration for the Condition 1 team when they wanted to add new products to the site. We structured it so that all product variants are now presented within a single PDP.
Being able to clearly see the exact size of the product is very important for Condition 1’s customers, so we designed the PDP to show the interior and exterior case dimensions directly below the product title as well as in the more detailed product specs section.
To help make the shopping experience a seamless one and encourage further purchases, we added a drawer cart that pops out when a new item is added and displays popular products that other customers have purchased to offer cross-sell opportunities.
To improve customer support and help customers make purchases with confidence, we added automated shipment tracking and a returns portal using AfterShip and AfterShip Returns Center.
Dayton says he enjoyed how supportive and collaborative we were throughout our work together.
“It was just a very professional and seamless process from onboarding and discovery all the way down to when we launched. Anything I had an issue with, I brought it up and it was dealt with in a timely manner. The Ethercycle team was super attentive through that first week or two post launch and Kurt did a short 30-day follow-up with me to make sure there wasn’t anything additional needed.”
“Every metric on our end has improved…”
The new website launched in August 2022, delivering a much better customer experience and elevating the overall professionalism of the brand. The company saw a return on investment within the first month of launching.
“Every metric on our end has improved — conversion rate, average order value, time spent on site, bounce rate. It was awesome to see results and the justification for the project almost immediately after the site going live.”
The new site also has also improved the Condition 1 team’s workflows. Dayton says dealing with returns and exchanges has been streamlined with the introduction of the new returns portal and the way we structured the site has made it much easier for the team to to add new products.
Dayton says he’d recommend Ethercycle to others and is looking forward to collaborating with us again in the future.
“It was very refreshing to work with a team of people who focus on the Shopify platform. It made the process smoother and the results speak for themselves. I know Ethercycle has clients that stay on board and come back for future revamps or improvements and I definitely see our relationship continuing.”
Our Work Together
Ethercycle helped Condition 1:
- Design and develop a new custom theme for their DTC site to make huge improvements to the shopping experience and better reflect the high quality of Condition 1’s products
- Increase conversions, average order value, and time on site and decrease bounce rate within a month of launching the new site
- Improve customer support and the customer’s ability to purchase with confidence with the addition of a returns portal and automated order tracking
- Reduce friction in the process of adding new products to the site and streamline work for handling returns and exchanges