Iakoe x Gossamer
Overview
Gossamer looks at the world - travel, design, art, culture & food - through a green lens. They tell stories that channel the mindset of someone having their best high; interviews, features, photo essays, recommendations & more. The brand’s legacy website was disconnected from their magazine experience & lacked a mobile first design. Gossamer engaged us to design & build a new website with the vision of translating their editorial experience into a high converting Shopify store. Here’s a breakdown of some of the tactics that we deployed…
- User experience design
- Web development
- Search engine optimization
- Conversion rate optimization
Rethinking user journeys
The shopping experience on the legacy website was a hindrance to conversion. The brand’s customers shop with an outcome in mind (improved sleep, energy etc) but the user experience didn't reflect that. Users were required to click on each product to better understand what it did which resulted in high bounce rates. We opted to redesign the NAV to shorten the user journey & to create an intuitive shopping experience by helping users find the relevant product as quickly as possible (grounded in the logic of providing a “shop by need" journey).
Unlocking the true potential of SEO
The shop section of the legacy site was on a subdomain (shop.gossamer.co) which meant the domain authority on gossamer.co wasn’t being passed to their PDP pages & they weren't ranking for high traffic commercial intent keywords they should have been. The brand has an authoritative backlink profile but it wasn’t being leveraged to its full potential through a well planned site architecture & as a result their organic search channel was underperforming. We redesigned the website with a revised site structure to effectively channel the authority of the backlink profile to PDP pages.
Designing content templates
Gossamer had previously been using Contentful to manage the editorial experience but wanted to leveraged the Shopify blog functionality within the rebuild process (without compromising on the look, feel & experience that Contentful provides). We designed 7 blog templates that could be easily customized to ensure they article experience didn’t feel repetitive & that the Gossamer team could easily style each piece to reflect that of their magazine experience.
Improving product storytelling & organic search potential
The nature of Gossamer’s products requires in-depth PDPs that provide the user with a thorough, yet digestible overview of each product. We needed to balance the UX design with ensuring the PDPs were structured optimally for SEO. We conducted keyword research for long tail keywords for each products benefits, ingredients & FAQs to ensure we were maximizing the organic search traffic driving potential of each product.
Results
Page speed insights score
ecommerce conversion rate
return on investment
