Marie Oliver

Command C helped Marie Oliver achieve their vision by integrating their store with a new Shopify theme and customizing it to meet their needs. The strength and beauty of this project is not only that the end result is a shining success, but that the collaborative process we followed led to clarity, efficiency and a really fun project all around. 

Crafting a Prized Process

Website development is not easy. The process is complex and layered and in order to be efficient, needs to constantly iterate. After our planning phase, we elected to complete our work using live content; product data (availability, product photos, etc),page data, blog posts, etc.. This approach had two advantages: 1) this is the actual data. You don’t have to imagine what the site is going to look like with placeholder images and copy; 2) It allowed us to create a concrete launch list, strategizing which elements would need to be turned on and/or switched at launch.

As an example, Marie Oliver had an About page with existing content on it. They knew they had more flexibility with the new About page than the old one, but they couldn’t change the content on the existing live site because the existing live theme did not support it. So we knew that we’d need to test a secondary page and that, at launch, we’d make sure their new pages got published, maintaining existing permalinks and/or redirecting old permalinks as needed. This approach is all about making a definitive launch plan between the two themes. We could do this because we worked in their environment. 

Many of the changes the merchant wanted to make when they launched the new site turned out to be things that were worth completing within the existing theme and prior to launch. They revised their existing descriptions with better ones, removed description content that the new theme handled more dynamically, and ended up way ahead of the game when it came to content deployment.

Because the Marie Oliver team had access to the new theme at the start of the process, we had more collaboration between our teams then we typically do – and both teams LOVED it! It opened the floodgates to creativity and all the possible customizations. These enhancements included:

An Optimized Approach to Color Swatches

One of the legacy issues at hand was that this site had never had color swatches before. Products were not structured with variants, instead every color was its own product, and this did not readily translate into a unified experience for styles that came in multiple colors and/or prints.  Leveraging the theme’s built-in components and some custom development we created a user experience that allows  customers to see all the available colors when they’re on the product page. This wasn’t possible using the old theme.  

Product Listing Page Enhancements Net Greater ROI

Command C also optimized product listing pages (PLPs). Out of the box, the new theme wasn’t full width and displayed photos that were too small and too far apart. Hover features left a lot to be desired. After our custom development work, the PDPs now display big, beautiful imagery that tiles down the PLP. Plus, when customers view a PDP and click on an image, a new zoom feature helps them see and understand the product better. The filters app they were using – which they ultimately wanted to keep – tucked its trigger icons at the top of the PLP. Users scrolling through products would not be able to access filtering tools without returning to the top of the page. We modified this to remain visible as the user scrolls down the page . All of these user experience optimizations have led to a much better customer experience and significantly improved conversion rates.