$1M vs $20M Ecommerce Brands: How They Handle a Redesign

Blaze here for Week 11,

I’m back on the horse, and since the last email, Shovel launched a new brand identity & website for Diamond Cross Ranch. A 100-year-old generationally passed-down ranch in Wyoming that also happens to be a clothing brand. Also, within the last 30 days the code has been cracked again on social media content, gaining 3.3 million views. 2M+ was the month prior.

That work translates to 47 unique leads in 60 days with a $10k - $80k budget. The next gap I'm fixing is my close rate. There's a handful of promising projects from this I really want to land.

Generally, the brands that see positive impact from Shovel are in the range of $1 million a year to $20 million. Let's talk about what I look for in projects based on e-commerce team structures going forward.

Before jumping in ^ here’s our work with Diamond Cross Ranch. This was an amazing summer project for a brand with a legit history of being cowboys. We worked directly with the founder, who is a cowboy himself. What a pleasure; you can see phase 1 live today. The next phase will include a clean suite of imagery we briefed for them to shoot. This was a collaboration project with Situation Normal. I’ve talked about David on this platform here. He’s a guy I can hope to work more with.

Now there are definitely learnings from this project that correlate with other projects Shovel launched in the last two years.

Problems between “mid-sized” brands that make $1,000,000 a year to $20,000,000

Unique positioning is figured out through distribution, product, or sales channel. The team is small (less than 20 people) and you work with multiple agencies. The founder is most focused on product & marketing but is spread thin across every department of the business. The Shopify store was DIY’d up until this point, or a budget freelancer has been building it out for them; now they want a few professionals to give it a makeover.

This is needed because the website has been identified as a major bottleneck in sales, maintenance efficiency, or the brand's world perception. Sometimes all three of these things.

Shovel specializes in this problem. These are gaps that can cripple our work:

Important stakeholders to the e-comm are hired after the design/dev phase.

Whoever maintains the brand and website must be involved with all decisions made about the identity of the website. If you’re missing that context, we paint it for you with a documented brand book and Notion guidelines to maintain the store.

In these modern days, we see those resources get dropped into an LLM (which always happens), which slowly starts to kill the work.

There must be someone on the team, whether it’s a founder, creative director, CMO, or the design/dev agency, that can be responsible for the preservation of these things going forward. Again, it’s ideally someone who was involved with the creation of them.

My friends at Alright Studio talk about their approach to this problem here.

This is a website we made in the early days that ended up using AI-generated product photos by another co-founder we weren't in contact with. I'm not anti AI. I've worked with brands that do it very well. But what screams fake product more than an inaccurate shot of it on your live website?

What’s the difference between $1M and $20M?

Stakeholders in the brand and website on the high end trust us fully for our taste and performance knowledge that’s gained from experience over the years of work we put into design.

I’m not trying to inflate my ego, but on the low end of that dollar amount. We’ve been in situations where we present all the data & instincts to prove a design decision just to get shut down by a gut feeling. It doesn’t feel good to know you’re making a choice that sacrifices you from the project objective, which is my next point.

How do you stay aligned on the objective?

I find that most problems with projects can be solved from the onboarding. Here we want to define the problem and solution as much as possible. You do this in the sales process, but it happens here too.

I talked to Giorgio Favotto recently, a veteran in the fashion e-commerce game with his studio NodNod. They literally take a brand vs. conversion spectrum and place a dot onto it in their onboarding.

In projects with Shovel going forward, we will constantly reference this spectrum as a north star because I've had stakeholders stray away from the agreed direction as soon as the work is about to launch.

All of this to say, brands on the higher revenue number usually identify very strongly with one of these experiences, and that's generally in the brand-conversion bucket. My personal favorite. Most websites I talk about in my content are here.

Staying level-headed

This is a short, simple statement. I’m not calling out anyone specific, but I’ve seen this behavior replicated across multiple projects.

Both approaches are reasonable. The smaller brands are on fire; the bigger brands have more financial padding to sit on. My point is as a design studio it's very important to have these expectations constantly be reminded, especially in the onboarding. There need to be clear actions to take if an unexpected or expected result happens.

For example, if conversion drops within the first two weeks and that feels consistent day by day, we need to have clear UX insight into what's causing that. Which you can easily do with Shopify Analytics nowadays and Microsoft Clarity.

In the past we've allowed these major redesigns to happen last second, but in the future we look at the least amount of design details possible to fix a potentially leaking funnel. It's a shame to spend months and months working on something that you feel is complete, beautiful, and mutually agreed upon to be completely swapped out last second.

I'm not trying to downplay anyone. I'm trying to share my shortcomings running a studio and how I've approached fixing our process.

Life/what’s new

My Instagram hit 100k, actually, it flew past that amount to 130k in a month. This is the most follower-based growth I’ve ever had. It's because I’ve found a few performing content formats at once. To this day I still hand-design & strategize my videos. That’s my greatest skill. It's not just an influx of followers I've gotten but an influx of leads as well. This has reignited conversations with new and existing brands I've dreamed to work with. It's also opened the door to many new sponsorships and free products as well, which is a great bonus to this. To this day, I still say posting content is my highest lever action.

In the space of web design it's still not oversaturated, but it'll get there very soon. There are many people copying content, but the issue is that they don't know what works when the algorithm switches week by week. If you're thinking about content as an acquisition funnel, I urge you to start now.

Torrent

This boy is 5 months old. I probably enjoy him 50% of the time now that his baby shark teeth are gone. Tons of learning to do, we’re currently trying to eliminate his reactiveness on leash. He loves people and other dogs, just a little too much…

Life after Shovel

I've thought about this since the beginning. What does a successful end to Shovel look like? I talk to a lot of friends who run studios, and often they can't answer this question. Usually vaguely answered by a big financial reward.

Do I set an expiration date to tackle new fulfilling work like Modem? Do I sell to a larger agency like VAAN? Do I acquire brands and make an AI platform like Darkroom? My point is there are different endings to this game.

Since the beginning I've wanted to transition the studio into its own brand that's heavily supplemented by the experience we've gained. My girlfriend and I put a lot of thought into a dog brand. Still love the idea, but we didn't love it enough to actually put effort into it outside of our working lives.

When I was nineteen, I started a clothing brand and essentially gave up right at the beginning. I felt my lack of budget and network was a massive limitation, so I ended up stopping the work. When I look back on that, the POV injected into that brand made a lot of sense, and it actually could have been something real today.

Well, today I have that budget and a network in the industry. I’ve been able to see the failures and wins behind the scenes of brands in fashion. Also, what would be more credible than hiring a studio that actually has their own brand like yours?

This is a woman in the red dress situation. I could be chasing it too early before Shovel evolves into something big. but..

If I don't start a clothing brand again, I'll live with regret. I've had so many product ideas that I want to see in the world that I'm just not able to create through Shovel. We’re a decent player in the fashion e-commerce game, and I think there's going to be credibility to that new brand story. Acne Studios defined the playbook of design agency/collective to brand, and I reference it heavily.

With that said, it's a huge effort, and I've really thought about where my time will be spent. It's absolutely vital that we continue to build the portfolio in this space. We still have projects in the works that I am absolutely thrilled to show. They just need time to cook.

Take care

Feel free to reply to this email with any recommendations you may find valuable here.

Talk next week! - Blaze