Happy Sunday!
If you’re reading this, I hope you’re sitting back, relaxed, with a beverage in your left hand, feet up, and your AC turned on. Today’s going to be a fun read, telling you about some of my favorite website elements and tactics we’ve implemented recently.
Before we get into today’s newsletter, here are some quick updates for you:
The last episode of Limited Supply, Season 7, is out. Moiz and I did another Q&A, sourcing questions from our Slack community. Make sure you give it a listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify! It’s a really fun way to close out the season, and we talked all about our daily schedules, how to build a remarkable landing page, and product-market fit versus product-marketing fit.
Are you going to be at The Whalies this year? They’re being held in New York City, and I’ll be taping a live episode of Limited Supply there on April 10th. Come say hi to me and Harley — grab your ticket on this link & use code “NIKVIPTICKET” for 40% off!
Hiring Alert! Sharma Brands is looking to hire an Ops Assistant based in New York City! If that’s you, or you know someone who’d be a good fit, apply here.
Lately, more people have been emailing me exactly what topics they’d want me to write about. First of all, thank you! The hardest part of this newsletter is the inspiration of what to write about next — if you have ideas, always email them over to me or just reply to any of the newsletters.
Second, I’ve noticed there’s a clear mix of what people want. Some people love the deep dives on things like catalog ads or native advertising, some people want tactical strategy of how to launch whitelisted influencer campaigns, and some people just want me to get in the weeds on what I love about certain websites. If the last one is you, then today’s your lucky day.
If you’ve been a subscriber for a bit, then you know I’m a huge proponent of designing your site so you can convert at any time. I’ve talked through the necessary elements of a website, the pages you need to have, and the tech stack to launch with before... so for today, I wanted to get a little more specific, and my hope is something you read today inspires a thought for you to better your website. PS, at the very least you can be gathering insights like this just by using Heatmap.com on your own website.
Today, I’m going to review a handful of websites that the Sharma Brands team has designed and launched in the past few months and discuss a few things I really love from both a brand-building and a conversion-driving perspective. Today’s newsletter will probably be shorter than the average, so reply and let me know how you like it! Oh, and if you want us to design, develop, or relaunch your website, hit us up!
Simon Pearce
Check out the site: SimonPearce.com
This website is a beautiful example of how to take the amazing story of the Simon Pearce brand and bring it to life with the Sharma Brands design team. For this site, we ported Simon Pearce to Shopify Plus from Magneto, and we had many opportunities to increase the site's efficiency.
My two favorite pieces of this website:
The Collections Page: If you go to any of the collections (for ex, the Spring collection), you’ll see how beautifully the collections is explained up top, and whether you’re on desktop or mobile, the page just works beautifully. We made the customer journey the biggest priority here, but we didn’t sacrifice beautiful design to do it.
The “Shop The Look” Section: On the homepage, you’ll see a tablescape with numbers, and products to the right side. This section gets a lot of activity and engagement. Based on our heat map findings, we prioritized it in the page to where we found it drove the highest revenue, based on where on the page it sat. It’s a great way to showcase multiple SKUs, and storytell the brand, in a fun way.
Tattoo Numbing Cream
Before I show you the website, click this to see what the website used to look like.
Now, check out the new site + brand we worked on: TattooNumbingCream.com.
Isn’t that amazing? I’m telling you, the Sharma Brands design team is the best in the game. My favorite part of this site would be hard to gather if you weren’t on the internal team of this project, so I’m going to share that secret with you.
We ran an extensive customer survey with the tens of thousands of customers that love this product, to really understand who it was that was buying it, why they were buying it, how often, what they loved about it, etc. When we got the results back, we identified 3 personas for the brand, and built the entire site around it.
One of the best findings we had, was understanding what questions people had before making a purchase. To counter that, we built a beautiful FAQ module on the PDP, and with everything else, when the site launched, it more than doubled conversion rate.
The lesson? Figure out what your customers are on the fence about, and make it stupidly obvious when they are at the point of pulling the trigger (aka, about to click “Add to Cart”).
RARE Beauty Comfort Club
Click here to access the Comfort Club
One of the coolest projects we got to work on recently was designing the RARE Beauty Comfort Club online to coincide with their new product line they rolled out recently. The brand launched first on SEPHORA, then everywhere else, but really wanted to create a destination for their customers to interact with the brand, not just purchase.
We built out the Comfort Club, really as an interactive hub. Still, if you know anything about me, you know I always want to give ourselves an opportunity to generate revenue or collect first-party information. I share this example because it does a beautiful job of not aggressively looking to transact or collect information. Still, the page works well for both driving product sales and collecting information.
The punchline here? Take every opportunity to capture first-party data — you don’t need to ask for it aggressively, but give them the opportunity to join you.
The Skinny Confidential
Check out the website: ShopSkinnyConfidential.com
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what I love about this site, the overall design, visual identity update, and interactions across the site really make it fun to shop, on desktop and mobile.
When we launched this site, we were able to more than double CVR. I think a big part of it was designing sections on the PDP and homepage that really brought out the lifestyle aspect of the brand, and helped the brand up on its own, not just when its tied to Lauryn. You can see modules like the UGC, customers using the product, the reviews, and how the products work do a good job of this.
The tools that TSC sells are also not commonly found commoditized tools, so the sections explaining how to use the product or how they benefit you as a user also get a lot of engagement on the page itself.
Halfdays
Browse the brand: Halfdays.com
This might be one of my favorite brands ever, and I’m so grateful Sharma Brands got to help design and launch their current website. Not only does Halfdays have the best skiwear and outdoor apparel in its categories, but they also have the best website to go along with it.
A big part of what makes the site look so phenomenal is its photography. Cadence benefits from the same thing—high-quality photos that make your entire site and brand truly feel like a billion-dollar brand.
With Halfdays, here are a couple of my favorite pieces:
The Homepage: The homepage does such a great job bringing people into the brand in a way that is so on-brand. The interactive shop elements, the category-linking sentence between the two carousels, and the invitation to join the Halfdays community all introduce you to a fun-loving apparel brand.
We use Nostra across the whole website as there are a ton of assets to load, but we need the site to load instantly fast. On SFO Airport Wifi, the product page loaded in 0.59 seconds. Numbers don’t lie!
The Product Page: On the PDP, the shop the look, by the color, is one of my favorite elements. The auto-play UGC is also a great way to validate users’ minds as they’re deciding what to buy, especially if it’s their first time.
My favorite element on the PDP is the Size Chart, which is right above the size variant options. You can quickly see your size in a very organized but grand way. It’s not hard to read, or doesn’t require you to zoom into an image file of a chart, and if that doesn’t work, then you can use the Bold Metrics widget to input information and let Halfdays give you a size.
The punchline? The final decision-making questions someone has around size, flavor, scent, etc. make it easy to get confirmed answers.
Solawave
Check out the site: Solawave PDP
If you click the link above, you’re going straight to the PDP. This PDP was designed after we ran hundreds of thousands of people to landing pages and understood exactly what they needed to see, know, and read in order to purchase.
The PDP flows like a landing page. My favorite part has to be the animated iconography above the “Add to Cart” button. We’ve always seen animated icons slightly increase conversion rate—it may not double it, but it may add 0.2% to the overall number. The in-page before-and-after carousel section is also a huge driver of conversion.
The punchline from Solawave? Sell the benefits of using the product after 60 days!