How Manly Bands doubled their conversion rate with a fast, flexible site

Meet Manly Bands: A rapidly-growing Shopify brand on a mission to revolutionize ring shopping

Manly Bands helps every man (woman, and alien) find a genuine badass and unique-to-them wedding band. If you are going to wear one ring for the rest of your life, then you better be guaran 'damn 'teed to love it. Manly Bands was created so that EVERYONE could have a buying experience with reverence, class, and love during the selection process.

Challenge

A slow site, a highly customized product catalog, and complex business logic put a cap on growth

After setting up their Shopify store over a weekend, Manly Bands had launched 40 products in just a few weeks. They loved how easy it was to spin up a Shopify theme.

But after a few years, the team started to run into some challenges:

• Site speed & conversions: Instead of loading instantly, it took 8-9 seconds to load a product page—on average. Every few years, the team tried something new to boost their site speed—including edge caching, compressing images, migrating to a new theme—but site speed continued to be a major blocker to conversions.
• Complicated tech: To solve for site speed, the team built their own React middleware CMS, but they quickly realized that Shopify’s ease of use was key to their success.
• App overload: Switching back to a theme, the brand was determined to keep app count low so they could preserve their site speed, but they quickly ramped back up to 101 apps on their store, paying over $8k / year in 3rd party app costs.
• Unique, complex products: In addition to carrying a wide range of ring sizes—resulting in a ton of variants for each product—there are multiple layers of customization for every ring. That means the team has to lean heavily on metafields, tags and querying to effectively take a product from a digital cart to a customer’s door.
• Layering in offers: Discounting and other special offers offered new sources of revenue, but layering that logic into an already complex code base significantly upped the site complexity.

As site performance continued to be a critical blocker, and the team wanted to iterate on the site even faster, they knew it was time to find a better solution.

Manly Bands’ goal

Unlock growth and speed to market with a site that’s blazing-fast, flexible, and easy to use

After getting burned by a custom headless stack, Manly bands knew exactly what they needed to succeed:

• A blazing-fast site: It was time to banish the 8 second page loads for good—so they could unlock new growth with better conversion rates and SEO rankings.
• An easy user experience: Being a fast-moving, scrappy team, no one had time to invest in learning a new tool. They need something that would be as easy to use as a Shopify theme.
• Solutions focused on Shopify: The team wanted to prioritize tools that were 100% plugged into the Shopify ecosystem so they could take advantage of Shopify’s innovation.
• Less reliance on apps: The team loved the idea of built-in and bespoke toolsets so they could reduce expenses and cut the app bloat.
• Unlimited customization: Advanced discounting, content personalization, and tons of customization options for shoppers were all core to Manly Bands’ long-term growth strategy. They needed a platform that could support a high level of customization so they could continue to grow their offering and customer base.

It was a tall order, but SiteSource—Manly Bands’ top-notch web agency—knew that a Pack storefront built on Hydrogen would be a perfect fit.

Solution

A blazing-fast, flexible storefront on Pack + Shopify Hydrogen that’s as easy as a theme

In just over 3 weeks—135 hours of dev time—SiteSource had worked its magic, and Manly Bands launched a brand new shopping experience built on Pack’s flexible, open-source Hydrogen theme Blueprint—and saw immediate impact to the bottom line.

And that was only the beginning. In addition to improved conversions, the team saw:

• Blazing-fast load times: Instead of 8-9 second page loads, the experience felt instant.
• Less overhead $$ & fewer apps: The team was able to cut their app list in half—from 100+ to ~50 apps—and achieved significant savings on tools they didn’t need any more (ex. a caching layer that didn’t actually solve the site speed issue).
• Dev-free content editing: Instead of having to wait in a developer backlog, the team was empowered to make site updates on the fly in seconds.
• Bespoke experiences without breaking Shopify: Finally the team had the flexibility to add discounts, complex business logic, and expand their product catalog and customization options—without worrying so much about the tech debt or breaking Shopify.
• Built-in testing & personalization: the team is excited to tap into Pack’s A/B testing and personalization features to further optimize their shopping experience—especially so they can remarket returning shoppers by showcasing products shoppers haven’t purchased yet.
• Standardized, clean experiences: With global settings, the site looks much cleaner and simpler, and it’s easy to make the experience look cohesive across the site.

Results

Massive boost in conversions, insanely fast page loads, and savings on overhead costs

With the new site, Manly Bands’ results are literally jaw-dropping. The team is poised to grow faster than ever with a site that’s insanely fast and tailor-made for their business.

• 80%+ boost in CVR, going from 1.2% to just over 2%, essentially doubling their business.
• 8x faster page loads, going from 8-9 seconds to near instant.
• $8k+ / year savings on apps