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oVertone Haircare
oVertone Haircare is a predominantly DTC eCommerce brand with a great product and loyal customer base. Their line of pigmented conditioners offer a hair-healthy, semi-permanent, and 100% cruelty-free alternative to hair dye to help customers achieve and maintain head-turning hair colors.
The company was doing an impressive $30 million in sales, but wasn’t profitable, in part due to spending about $3 million in tech and IT staff to run and support their online store, which was a custom-built headless Shopify site. Seeing the opportunity to optimize the business and increase profitability, Ezra Firestone bought oVertone along with Drew Sanocki and other private equity partners.
They immediately set out to streamline operations, including simplifying the site’s tech stack to just Shopify. Maintaining and updating the headless site was a lengthy and cumbersome process and was impossible to do without involving developers. Ashley Sorensen, who was brought on as the company’s new president, says that everything from standing up a new page to swapping in a new banner image to making a change to product description text required back-end coding.
“It was definitely more expensive, because you are having to pay a development team to manage the site, and the turnaround time that it takes to make any changes could be anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks. When we acquired the company, we wanted to have the ability to pivot quickly and make quick changes to our site without having to engage developers.”
oVertone wanted a trusted partner to help them to move from headless to a native Shopify solution within 60 days of the acquisition.
“We know the Ethercycle team and the quality of work that they do, so there was absolutely no hesitations or trepidations to engaging them. Really the only question that we had was would we experience any downtime on our site while the transition was taking place? And the answer was no, we would not.”
Designing and developing a custom Shopify theme with a high-end design
We kicked things off with Ethercycle’s Designer-Developer Tom Siodlak creating a new site design that would elevate and best showcase oVertone’s products and make it easier for customers to find the best product for them.
“Tom had a great eye for detail in making our site look fantastic with a visually appealing design. He provided expertise and attention to not only what looks aesthetically pleasing, but also what helps drive conversions.”
We developed a highly-customized theme to execute the design, building out features such as a new mega menu that makes it easier for customers to find what they’re looking for and a sticky “add-to-cart” bar on product pages to increase conversions.
During the site build, we overhauled the organization of the product catalog so that it would work with Shopify’s Liquid templating language while also making it much easier for the oVertone team to add products and manipulate the data in managing the site. We also integrated the site with oVertone’s new Klaviyo set up, which they added as their new CRM system.
Using Shopify’s Online Store 2.0, we made it easy for the oVertone team to customize any part of the site without involving developers. They can go in at any time and edit any text, images, videos, or colors as well as add or replicate sections to pages throughout the site.
To help optimize the customer experience and add features that the oVertone team wanted to have on the site, we recommended and implemented Shopify apps that we know from experience would convert well and integrate seamlessly.
“For example, I asked what would be a good app for a search feature. Kurt said, ‘Well, Shopify has one built, but it's more basic. If we're looking for something that's more robust, I recommend the Product Filter & Search app that we've used on other brands.’ He sent me an example of it so that I can look at the implementation on other sites and test the functionality. It’s extremely helpful having Ethercycle’s expertise to continue to optimize our site and implement apps that will really help us increase our AOV and generate more revenue.”
We also helped oVertone identify an optimal free shipping threshold when they were considering changing it. Running an A/B test over three weeks confirmed that their existing threshold led to higher AOV and higher conversion rates.
Ashley says she particularly appreciated how collaborative we were and the clear and open communication throughout the project.
“The scope of work was very clearly laid out with what we can expect and when, and Ethercycle really met all of the deadlines. Working with them was very easy and it felt like they were an extension of our team. We had check-in calls along the way and it was really easy to communicate with them if we needed something. We were able to QA the site and provide feedback and Ethercycle would make any changes we needed within a day or two.”
Successful launch, improved site KPIs, reduced costs and an empowered marketing team
We completed the site build on time and the new site launched within the 60-day timeframe without any tech challenges or site downtime.
“We had a pretty aggressive timeline. Ethercycle worked so incredibly fast to get the new site up and running. It was all fairly seamless and we appreciated the attention to ensuring everything was working and stood up correctly for people placing orders.”
The switch to a native Shopify solution helped oVertone cut their top-line expenses and become profitable within 3 months of acquisition. It has also empowered their marketing team to easily and quickly make updates to the site.
“Rather than a very lengthy process with a lot of back and forth and waiting for the coding to be completed, now our designer can just go in directly and make changes and implementations to the site or stand up a new page when we’re running a launch. The ability to do that really quickly and internally without the use of a developer has really helped save time and cost.”
oVertone also saw some immediate improvements in site KPIs. There was a huge improvement in site speed, cutting the previous load time on headless in half. Site engagement was also improved. In the first two weeks after launching:
- Overall site bounce rate was down 2.25%
- Pages per session were up 103%
- Average session duration was up 14.32%
Ashley says she recommends working with Ethercycle to anyone looking for help to grow their Shopify store and already has sent others our way.
“It's very hard, in my experience, to find agencies that do things extremely well. The Ethercycle team are the experts in optimizing Shopify stores. Working with them was very easy and we really appreciated their deep knowledge of eCommerce sites, what converts and what works well, as well as their recommendations for our particular business.”
Our Work Together
Ethercycle helped oVertone:
- Replatform their eCommerce store from headless to Shopify within 60 days, helping streamline operations and reduce technical costs
- Make it easy for their marketing team to manage the site and make changes quickly and easily without involving a developer
- Identify an optimal free shipping threshold through A/B testing
- Cut site load time in half