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KeySmart

↑87% conversions YoY
(over a 90-day period)
↑10x return on investment
59 unique product templates
Since designing the first-ever compact key organizer, KeySmart has grown from a single product company into a global brand with 50+ unique products and worldwide retail distribution.

Being very eCommerce savvy, KeySmart did a lot of optimization and tweaking on every page of their site over the years since their last major site build in 2015.

However, most of the changes were very code intensive and began to get applied inconsistently, making the site increasingly inflexible for their team to work with. The workflow to add new products or make changes to the site also became increasingly long and complex.

“It went from basically a copywriter, then to a designer to mock up the design, then to a web developer to implement it. There would always be mistakes in the communication in between and they'd have to QA it to death.” ANDY BEDELL, DIRECTOR OF MARKETING, KEYSMART

The company wanted to overhaul their site with a new custom Shopify theme that would help them regain some of the flexibility they had lost and give their copywriters the ability to build new product pages themselves using the editor in Shopify.

KeySmart works with a range of outside vendors for development work, but wanted to engage Ethercycle for the project because they could trust that we would better advise them based on our deep Shopify expertise in addition to doing the implementation.

In terms of concerns, Andy was a bit uncertain if they'd get enough of a return on investment to make taking on the project worthwhile. He was also worried about any potential drops in conversions that would come after the site launch.

“We were somewhat worried about changing the website up and then maybe missing something that was there before and having that hurt the conversion rate.” ANDY BEDELL, DIRECTOR OF MARKETING, KEYSMART

Executing an extremely technical design

We worked very closely with the KeySmart team to rebuild their website in a way that would give them more flexibility and agility, without losing what was working well for them. We implemented a fully custom and highly technical theme based on the design KeySmart's internal team developed.

One of the challenges we tackled was KeySmart's very customized and very complex product bundle structure, which KeySmart had designed and tested over time to optimize conversions and average order value. Each bundle offers a different kind of discount, which meant writing custom code for each one.

“We do a lot of upsells on the site and it’s not native to the way that Shopify pages work. Ethercycle was able to help us keep our custom bundles, but made it easier for us to deploy them and make sure that we have the newest accessories included.” ANDY BEDELL, DIRECTOR OF MARKETING, KEYSMART

To accommodate KeySmart's need for a much higher level of customization than Shopify themes allow for, we built 59 custom product templates.

Within the product templates, and on the homepage, we implemented sections to make it possible for KeySmart to more easily edit the pages and pull in the content they need to show off the features and benefits of their products— including trust badges, FAQs, and use cases.

We built out and customized a mega menu that features enhanced content such as product and collection listings and images, which is fully editable by KeySmart to swap in the products and content they'd like to highlight.

Throughout the project, we provided a very high level of support and communication, integrating with their team to ensure every part of the site worked as intended in the design.

Faster workflow and reduced costs to launch new products, contributing to increased conversions and revenue

As a result of the solutions we built into their custom theme, KeySmart can now make changes and add new products to their site with less friction, far less time, and fewer people involved.

It used to take three people two weeks to launch a product. Now it takes one copywriter two days. We have all these different kinds of custom sections that we can go into and build out a new page really quickly just how we want it. The easier it is to launch it on the website, the easier it is for our team to move in more products and be quicker to market.ANDY BEDELL, DIRECTOR OF MARKETING, KEYSMART

The new theme also gives KeySmart the flexibility to more easily create, test, and optimize different layouts of pages without needing to bring in a developer.

The site has a more cohesive and cleaner feel and performs faster. With new features such as the mega menu and use of sections, KeySmart is better able to present their ever-growing catalog of products to their customers.

“As we've grown, it has been harder and harder to showcase all the different products that we have. We've been launching so many products recently and some of them are a little bit more out of left field and we have to then figure out where they go. Having good navigation that shows off the different products in a good and flexible way has been really helpful.ANDY BEDELL, DIRECTOR OF MARKETING, KEYSMART

In the first 90 days after launching the new site, KeySmart saw an 87% increase in conversion rate and six times the revenue over the same 90-day period the previous year.

Even taking into account other contributing factors, Andy estimates KeySmart has gotten about a 10x return on investment from the work with Ethercycle through increased conversions, reduced labor costs, and being able to launch more products more quickly.

Our Work Together

In creating a highly-technical custom theme, Ethercycle helped KeySmart:

  1. Be more nimble with the ability to make changes and add new products to their site with less friction
  2. Launch products more quickly — reducing the time to build a new product page from 2 weeks to 2 days
  3. Maintain their unique bundle structure using custom product templates
  4. Better showcase their ever-growing catalog of products
  5. Achieve a 10x return on investment

Our most complex Shopify theme built to date

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