Bodega
Bodega, Their Challenges and Pain Points
Bodega is one of the foremost tastemakers amongst streetwear and sneakerhead aficionados. With two retail locations “hidden in plain sight” with a heavy emphasis on a unique, memorable experience, their ecommerce experience had fallen a bit behind.
When we started working together, Bodega's Shopify theme was slow and bloated with unused applications, inefficient Liquid code done by previous freelancers, and unoptimized assets throughout the site.
This older architecture had not been updated, at a code level, for many years and failed to take advantage of the improvements Shopify's platform had been making. This resulted in a poor user experience, with very high load times and subpar conversion rates. In particular, this theme was a challenge for Bodega's high-profile drops and releases, when the site had a lot of traffic. On at least one occasion, during a high profile drop, the entire site crashed due to the inefficiency of the code.
Coldsmoke’s Solution
We had one goal in mind for Bodega’s improved website - to create an exceptional customer experience that could handle the traffic that comes with being one of the leading tastemakers for streetwear and sneaker heads alike.
We rebuilt their Shopify theme from scratch. This included a full audit of their installed applications, removing any we found to be unnecessary both via uninstalling and removing them, at the code level. For any remaining apps providing necessary functionality, we leveraged a proprietary solution to load them only as needed on any given template, significantly reducing the load time across the site. We also optimized all of their assets at both the product and variant level, as well as all of the lifestyle and other photos within the Shopify file system.
Finally, we built a new theme schema and architecture to be up to Shopify’s latest standards, significantly improving the control that the Bodega team had to merchandise the site, as well as improving the overall site speed. The Bodega team is now able to better manage the site on their own by building custom sections for every customer experience through a high-performing and easy-to-manage website.
As their development partner, we continue to work closely with their team to develop custom functionalities for both their flagship site and ancillary, hyped drop specific stores as well.
Results
As a result, they saw a 40%+ improvement in conversion rates immediately following the release of the updated theme. Given there were no design changes, we feel confident that the improved user experience and performance of the site were a major part of this improvement.
