Oddbird Co.
The project came with its own unique set of challenges. The goal was to seamlessly upscale Oddbird's digital experience on their website. This included UI design and development, as well as refining user experiences to create a unified, efficient digital presence. Finding the right balance between maintaining Oddbird's image-heavy aesthetics and creating optimised functionality presented an exciting hurdle to tackle.
There were also a handful of customer pain points that were actually inhibiting the conversion journey, and were stopping customers from completing their checkout - resulting in revenue loss for Oddbird.
To create a better experience when shopping and navigating Oddbird's website - eliminating conversion blockers and creating 'quick to checkout' journeys - that would increase revenue gain overall via increased sales and less customer dropoffs.
With Oddbird having a very 'image-led' brand pillar - we also wanted to make the website a place where customers enjoyed staying for a while. Whether browsing/buying or reading journal entries, we wanted to increase dwell time on the site to double down on customer retention through storytelling and site experience.
To start the project off, I took an audit of Oddbird's current site at the time - noting areas of the site that had high customer engagement and also cross referencing with areas of the site that were getting the most support cases and creating the most frustrations for customers. Using this as a base, I created a quick hypothesis around how by decluttering the experience, and taking 'functionality over branding' in certain specific areas of the site (like the product to checkout journey), we'd see an increase of sales and returning customers.
Creating a set of wireframes to help map out these new improvements, i created some quick prototype journeys showcasing the ease and speed of which these incremental uplifts would bring. We tested these with a small select few customers, who all agreed that the experience was "smoother" and "felt right" and "gave them confidence".
I proceeded development on the new site making sure to include the new improvements to the overall functional experience - especially focusing on mobile, as their previous offering was not mobile friendly at all.
After completing the build, we added a new 'Journal' micro-site within the main site, to create an environment where blog posts/journal entries could live, and really invite customers into the world of Oddbird and its native country, Turkey. We also created links back to products associated with relevant articles to add to the overall increased conversion strategy.
Never having developed in Shopify before and being the first time utilising Liquid as the syntax, there were definitely some personal learning curves and times where I wasn't sure I would be able to achieve parts of what I set out to achieve - however, the internet is a glorious place full of many great educational resources, and utilising help from some friends who had 'Liqiud' experience, helped educate me along the way.
The project's outcome speaks volumes. Oddbird's website and brand digital identity have been streamlined, and efficiently refined to create an experience that led to an 800% (yes 800%!!) revenue increase in 2020/21, an increase that was able to set a benchmark for them, and one that they continue to build off of YoY (+10-15% each year) to this very day.
Their customers are spending more time engaging with their editorial content, purchasing more products more often - and at an increased speed to checkout - a far better user experience, and an incredibly scaled revenue return for Oddbird.
