Dock & Bay
Bespoke Shopify build across multiple
territories, with bundling and personalisation designed to lift basket value.
- +28% Growth in global online revenue
- +8% Increase in global AOV
- +130% Increase in UK organic revenue
- +57% Increase in EU conversion rate
Project overview
Dock & Bay is a lifestyle brand built on bold colour and pattern, selling direct to customers in the UK, US and Europe. How the brand looks and the experience they give to customers online are treated with equal importance, and both are tightly controlled.
International growth had been quick, and the brand had quickly become restricted by their existing Shopify theme, and how it had been developed. Merchandising changes needed developer time, market by market content was awkward to manage, and the customer experience drifted between territories. The commercial cost of that was a basket that was not working as hard as it could be.
Herd was appointed to rebuild the theme, using our custom framework. The build had to carry the brand experience without diluting it, hand day to day merchandising back to the internal team, and leave room to add territories later.
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The brief
The deliverable was a new Shopify theme. The requirement was an approach that could take on more markets without a rebuild each time, and a buying journey that gave customers a reason to add a second product. Dock & Bay had a design vision that most Shopify builds would have compromised to fit theme conventions, and an internal team that needed to run campaigns without booking development time.
Key objectives - Shopify re-theme
- Re-build the Shopify website to be capable of handling current and future markets in an efficient way
- Increase average order value
- Increase conversion rate
- Reduce friction on mobile and improve product discovery
- Give the internal Dock & Bay team the control over merchandising
Project highlights
Standard theme conventions would have flattened the design. We engineered the front end from scratch so the creative work survived the build, and kept Shopify's merchandising, reporting and app ecosystem behind it. The site reads as Dock & Bay rather than as a template with the brand colours applied.
The store runs across the UK, US and European territories on localised domains with market-specific content. Hreflang and structured internationalisation were built in at the foundation. Adding a territory is now a configuration job.
Customers assemble their own product combinations and see the promotional saving build as they go. The rules sit in the admin, so the Dock & Bay team can change what qualifies and what the incentive is without a development ticket.
Names and initials can be added to products at the point of purchase. It gives the range a premium tier and a reason to pay more for the same towel, and it makes the product harder to return or resell.
Navigation, content hierarchy and product journeys were rebuilt around mobile behaviour. Combined listings group variants and related products so the range appears in one place, which cut the number of steps between landing and adding to basket.
Klaviyo back-in-stock notifications hold demand on out-of-stock lines and release it when the product returns. The content management build gives the team the same speed on campaign pages and seasonal landing pages.
The results in detail
Figures compare post live performance with the previous years performance, across multiple markets.
- 26% growth in online revenue across the UK, USA and EU
- 7% increase in average order value in the UK, USA, and EU
- 9.5% growth in average order value specifically in the UK
- UK mobile revenue increase of 29% YoY since go-live this year
- EU mobile conversion rate improvement of 57% post launch
Why this worked?
A team of Shopify developers, designers, architects and SEO's working together to deliver the Dock & Bay mission.
The decision that shaped this project was refusing to let Shopify's defaults set the design. Dock & Bay's identity is a commercial asset, so the front end was engineered to carry it at full strength. Everything built behind that decision was designed to be handed over. Bundling rules, personalisation options, market content and campaign pages all sit with the Dock & Bay team, which is what makes the platform useful for the next three years and not only for launch week.
