The canvas is blank when it comes to the start of a grand project, the unknowns are unknown. Bolt-wear, established in 2022 by my business partner and I, was a joint venture in getting my quirky drawings and animal illustrations into the wild. I wasn’t much of website designer or marketing specialist at the time, all my knowledge came from being an artist and selling myself.

The initial philosophy of the site was just that, maintain quirkyness at all point. And thus we designed something that esthetically matched our vision. (image on the left)

Initially this design filled the needs when had for the products we wanted to display. The front page had a unique interactive quality and the “click through rate” was satisfactory. The “Shop Now” button became our most used button and was followed by a page displaying everything in our current collection.

1 year into our venture, the tick in customer click through started to dwindle. the average path through our system would be [Home > Shop Now > “sub category” > End Session] rarely would it end up in a buy and rarely would it end up in a second category click. Bolt-wear was outpacing itself making new products and confusing the customer with quirk, while not having a clean system to organize.

Our first pass for categorization took reference from TeeTurtles system of organization. The customer could either sort by Licensed material/animal/interest/artist. Our categories were reflected in that with animal/board game/catch phrase. However we believe this lead less to a fun choice for the customer and more to confusion as to where the shirt they want may actually be. (below is TeeTurtles catergories)

So what was the next step? We had to retool our customers ability to navigate our site successfully. And how were we going to get the most clicks on products? The end goal was always to get an item in the basket and purchased. Squarespace was our current hosting site and the sites tools for recognizing the customer flow and developing marketing strategies was limiting. However feasible Squarespace limited the ability to scale up and scale outwardly. So we decided to rebuild our website using the alternative, Shopify. Strategically the backend allowed us to see the full spectrum of statistics as to when are where people were spending time on the site. It also allowed for highlighting products in new and interesting ways. Sale flags became a source of new clicks, “customers also bought” was a way to drag in more sales, and most importantly our original problem with categorizing our library of goods became manageable. We took away the quirk but maintained an exclusive appeal by overall categorizing the goods by type and then sub-categorizing by their launch window. Spring, Summer, etc. On the back end our click throughs resulted in more people browsing sub categories and reliably placing things into their carts. Overall, the journey towards developing a and marketing goods has been a constant lesson in failing forwards. If something didn’t work, we used the data we gathered and made an attempt at something that did. (Below is an image of bolt-wear)