“Who knew writing 'SHITI' on a napkin & taping it to an old cooler would have such a following?”
In episode 235, we heard how SHITI Coolers started with $400 in parody stickers back in 2016 and by 2019 had grown into a seven-figure lifestyle brand.
Today, they're back on the show to discuss their next phase of growth, beginning with a custom theme and rebranding effort. Not just any custom theme, when we built with them and launched less than 24 hours before recording this episode.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
4/26/2022
Kurt Elster: I know we’re both geriatric millennials at approximately 40-
Paul Reda: No. I am technically Gen X because it’s 1980.
Kurt Elster: That sounds so much cooler than millennial. Gen X. That’s badass. You’re like a mutant.
Paul Reda: You’re wrecking society with your avocado toast, whereas I remember when MTV was good.
Kurt Elster: I also remember when MTV was good, thank you. And I own a home and love avocado toast.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Do you have fond memories of summertime barbecues, drinking on the beach? I mean, I don’t because I grew up in a Skinner box, but I’m wondering if you do.
Paul Reda: I don’t have a script in front of me, so I can’t answer. Unlike you, reading that off a script.
Kurt Elster: Well, otherwise I stutter and just go completely off the rails.
Paul Reda: Hey, everybody. Do you poop-out at parties? Vitameatavegamin. Sure. I cook outside all the time. I love barbecuing.
Kurt Elster: How about getting really hammered with your friends? Assuming you were like 20 years younger.
Paul Reda: No, I don’t do that.
Kurt Elster: All right. You know, I didn’t do it until I was-
Paul Reda: I don’t like fun.
Kurt Elster: I did not visit a beach with a bonfire and get drunk until I was an adult.
Paul Reda: I’ve never done that.
Kurt Elster: We did like no traveling as a kid. But it seems like a really fun thing to do for a lot of folks. What if you could build a lifestyle brand around this?
Paul Reda: Does not sound healthy.
Kurt Elster: You know, all things in moderation. We are talking… We have a returning guest here we are talking to about-
Paul Reda: For. Just use more-
Kurt Elster: … for, et cetera. We’re talking about SHITI Coolers, a brand that celebrates the good times. It is a lifestyle brand. And they were on a previous episode of the show, I think it was 200-something, February 2020, and we were talking about this brand and how they’d gotten it from just a goofball idea to a seven-figure brand. Now, today, the guys are a client. You built a really awesome theme for them and we’re gonna talk through that and get updated on their progress.
So, we’re joined by Craig LeBlanc, who has joined SHITI Coolers full time this year. Congrats, Craig. And he took on redesigning the site and you developed that site. This has been an ongoing project for us. Just launched in the last 24 hours and so this is fresh in our mind, and the only thing I really did here was write some Shopify scripts to power it, but I still get to take partial credit. That’s the best part.
Paul Reda: You know, you’re the supervisor.
Kurt Elster: I did. I supervised.
Paul Reda: You supervised. That’s very necessary.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Did some loafing. Craig, Mr. Craig LeBlanc, are you there?
Craig LeBlanc: Yep. What’s up, Kurt? Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.
Kurt Elster: My pleasure. So, how long have you been involved with SHITI Coolers?
Craig LeBlanc: So, I’ve been involved with SHITI for the last five years, four of which were part time. Most of our team has been part timers. There were a couple guys that were full time, but up until recently most of it was kind of 50-50, part time, full time, but now the entire crew is on full time.
Kurt Elster: What changed? What was the thing? Because this has been going on since 2016 now.
Craig LeBlanc: Yeah. Yeah, what changed is I think we all kind of felt it that that next step is very close, but we had to go all-in in order to get to that next step, but yeah, we all just felt it from the culture that’s behind SHITI Coolers, and the lifestyle that’s now built around it. Our proof of concept with backpack coolers. People love what we’re putting out with those, so the timing just felt right for every single one of us.
Kurt Elster: It’s cool that the team was able to believe in it and commit to it and the business was able to support it. So, let’s start with how do you spell SHITI Coolers?
Craig LeBlanc: SHITI Coolers is spelled S-H-I-T-I, and we actually… We have that trademarked, which I’m not sure how many people have something that’s that closely related to a swear word trademarked, so we take pride in that too.
Kurt Elster: So, what’s the deal with the name? What’s the story here? Who or what is SHITI Coolers?
Craig LeBlanc: Our mission up to this point right now is we design badass party coolers that make drinking easy at an affordable price, so everything we do, we try and build it around that mission statement. If you want to reflect back on where we’ve come from, though, we’ve gotten to this point just based off of one sticker. So, the co-founder of the company, Trevor Zacny, he came back from a country music festival in Michigan and when he was at that festival, he saw a bunch of people with some old ass coolers that did the job and kept your beer cold, and they were perfectly fine. Then he saw some other people that had YETI Coolers, these big, bulky coolers, that they would lock up at night, or that they would put inside their truck and they were afraid of anyone taking them, and he kind of just thought that was interesting, and he got back from the country music festival and he was talking to his brother, Austin, and coincidentally Austin had just bought a YETI Cooler while Trevor was away.
And Trevor started ripping on him, making fun of him a little bit, saying like, “Why would you buy that overpriced cooler?” Trevor had this old ass green cooler that he took a napkin, wrote the word SHITI on it, and taped it to the front of it, posted it to Snapchat, got some laughs out of it. And it took him a little bit, but they actually looked at it and they’re like, “That might actually… We might be able to run with this.” So, they bought some stickers, started selling them on eBay. They were selling out quickly, just fulfilling orders out of the back of Trevor’s truck. Before you knew it, they had a WIX website. They were selling I think 10 to 15 individual stickers.
Shortly after that, it turned into hats and t-shirts, and before you knew it this thing was just catching a ton of momentum where they went from 10,000, to 50,000 to almost 100,000 followers on Instagram, and Facebook especially blew up, but within the first couple of years it really caught a lot of momentum. But the whole brand started out with just a simple sticker that said the word SHITI on it.
Kurt Elster: It starts with a single product, SHITI Cooler sticker, that evolves to multiple stickers, and then t-shirts, a brand plate, so I have one of these on my toolbox. I think it’s funny. Like a 3D, looks like a fancy brand plate. My 10-year-old saw it and goes, “Is that a joke?” Like, “Yes, my tool chest is not actually a SHITI Cooler.” And now what I think is interesting is the name of the brand was SHITI Coolers, didn’t actually sell coolers, and then more recently you sell the SHITI Cooler. The backpack.
Craig LeBlanc: Yeah, so we kind of… We make fun of that to a point, to where we kind of took the ass backwards route to it to where we launched all these products around the cooler without launching the cooler, which at a certain point our site was getting a ton of searches for cooler, because new people would come and be like, “Hey, where are your coolers at?” So, we fought that battle a little bit early on, but we really built the culture around the cooler, which now makes it much, much easier for us to actually push a cooler.
And it’s funny, just to go back real quick, you talked about the brand plate. I can remember the first day that we launched the brand plate, and all of us were up north drunk in a cabin, and we’re like, “I wonder if these things are gonna sell.” And we’re literally pulling up Shopify just looking at these brand plates selling like crazy, and that was one of the first moments I think as a group that we realized we can push a lot of different things, and very rarely do they not sell to some extent. We just… We have that good traction with our community and culture, like our followers right now.
Kurt Elster: And some keywords I’m hearing here are community and culture, and that’s what’s interesting about it, because on its surface, trying to explain this makes us sound insane. We’re like, “Yeah, it’s a brand called SHITI Coolers that for a while didn’t sell coolers and mostly sells stickers, t-shirts, and some patches.” What is that, that culture, and community, and lifestyle that you tapped into there?
Craig LeBlanc: I think it’s just knowing that you can embrace the good times and the bad times when you’re out there just trying to have fun with friends, family, whoever it may be, around a campfire, at the beach, at the pool, just not taking life too seriously. We really like to… Us as a group, anytime we’re together, man, we laugh so much, and that carries over into when we interact with our customers, and anytime we’re producing content. It’s very much humor-based content where we’re just trying to get a laugh out of our community and really connect with them, and not look fake. We’re very real in just about everything we do.
So, I think that’s our take on it. You look at a lot of these brands that are extremely high priced and they feel like they have to look a particular way or fit a certain persona, and we’re just kind of like, “Fuck it. We are who we are. We like to have fun.” And we enjoy having a good time, whether that’s just having a couple of beers around the fire or really getting wild at a music festival with your buddies.
Kurt Elster: I think what’s interesting, for a lifestyle brand like this to work, you are… It’s really it feels like a variation on nostalgia, where you take this moment in time, like hanging out with your buddies, having some beers, having fun, and then you turn that into like this is a brand that represents this 24/7. You know, it’s not unlike what you see Jimmy Buffet do with selling stuff to the parrot heads and Margaritaville. IT’s a really clever way to run a lifestyle brand without having to go the full premium luxury experience. It works both ways, but you have to be committed to authenticity, and I think that’s where… that’s the pitfall that has to be avoided.
Craig LeBlanc: Yeah. Real quick, the team is gonna love how you just pointed out Jimmy Buffet with Margaritaville, because we talk about that lifestyle and the way it fits in the brand so perfectly, so yeah, they’re gonna really like that one.
Kurt Elster: Interesting. Okay, so I’m not crazy. I picked up on it. Also, I’ve been listening to a lot of Jimmy Buffet just preparing myself for summertime.
Craig LeBlanc: Yeah. There you go.
Kurt Elster: So, how long has this site been on Shopify?
Craig LeBlanc: We have been on Shopify… I want to say we launched it, actually it was like Halloween night of 2017, I want to say. So, it’s at about four to five years, right in that timeframe. Maybe a little more or a little less.
Kurt Elster: Did it start with the theme that it had until recently?
Craig LeBlanc: We started out with a theme called… I can’t even tell you what our first theme was called, but it wasn’t very good. I want to say it was like District or something like that, and we actually… We heard about-
Kurt Elster: Oh, poor District.
Craig LeBlanc: It’s no fault of District. We were just so new to it that we didn’t know what we were doing, really. We put together something that could sell, but it by no means had logic built behind it and reasoning why we were doing what we were doing. We actually got turned onto Out of the Sandbox when Trevor and I were listening to your show. I don’t know how we even stumbled across your show at first, but you always ran the ad at the start and the finish for Out of the Sandbox, and the first theme that we actually transitioned to, I believe it was Flex I think it was what it was. We jumped onto Flex at first. And it just… It was a good fit to where we didn’t need any additional engineering to be done or any custom coding. Out of the box, we could make it look like a pretty good website, very functional, and we could incorporate the brand into it.
But I mean over the last two years, we’ve definitely hit a threshold to where we knew we needed to get to a point where we could redevelop our site and add customization to it. It was just a matter of being able to dedicate the budget and most importantly the time leading up to it.
Kurt Elster: You were on Turbo by Out of the Sandbox for some time.
Paul Reda: No, they were on Flex I thought he said.
Craig LeBlanc: Flex. Flex. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Flex. My mistake.
Craig LeBlanc: We’re on Turbo now.
Paul Reda: So, yeah. You were on Flex for years. You made a big new custom theme, and this was a big project. Takes a long time. It’s a big commitment by you guys. What was the triggering issues that you were having that made you want to completely do a whole new theme?
Craig LeBlanc: Yeah. No, that’s a good question. I would say when we went to the site, we felt like it didn’t encapsulate the brand. So, where if you go to our site now, and I’m sure after this episode you’ll be able to drop the link in there and everything to where people can check it out, but it’s very vibrant the way that it captures the colors, and the ice cubes, and the photos, and the way that the videos play in certain areas. We looked at our previous site and it was just like a black background with a bunch of static images. Just it looked stale, and it didn’t really fit the type of feel that they were going for.
When somebody lands on our website now, after we’ve just launched in the last 24 hours, the headline says right now your party starts here, and it really looks like your party starts here. 100%. You get that feel with the ice cube backgrounds and the videos. It just… It looks the part now, so I think we hit a point to where we just recognized that we needed to do a better job of encapsulating the brand through the website and the only way to really get that done was by doing it right. We could have done like a half-assed approach and pushed out something that was just very basic, but when we did take that leap, we knew we wanted to build out the wireframes in Figma, work with developers like yourselves, and talk through any and every customization that we could do to really take that next step and then not have to look back and be like, “Oh, we need to reiterate on it again soon.”
What we have in place right now, it’s a good building block for us to add on little by little over time.
Kurt Elster: So, you went from we just had District, then you had Flex, and it was customized, and you had a lot of features and apps powering it. And so, the turning event is at some point you just went, “This no longer represents our brand as we gain more experience, and it evolves.”
Craig LeBlanc: 100%.
Kurt Elster: Diving, and then you just went straight into, “Let’s build a custom theme so that we get exactly what we want.” What’s that look like? What did the design, the discussion look like, the thought? How do you get there? Because it’s a big leap to go to, “All right, we know enough. We’re gonna build our own custom theme.”
Craig LeBlanc: Yeah, I think a huge piece to it that I can’t emphasize enough is you have to have somebody a part of your team, or you have to have access to getting the assets that you need to really make it look the part, so Luke, I mentioned him earlier already, he’s our content manager or our director of content, and the way he… His perspective on things, the way he looks at the brand, the way he can go to an event or just out in public and get certain photos to look a particular way, and record video content that looks a certain way to fit the brand, that is 100% needed for you to even have that conversation, I feel. If you can’t tie the products along with the feel of your brand, then it just… It’s not gonna fully come together.
So, we really hit a point to where we knew we had all of the content that we needed based around a large amount of products to where we could highlight different types of backpack coolers, stickers on a cooler, shirts, hats, whatever it might be. We had everything we needed to launch when it comes to the assets. And then really, it was just getting the ball rolling with those early conversations, man. We were having weekly meetings from September through November where we were specifically talking about layer by layer what we wanted. Hey, what do we want the homepage to look like? We would talk about that one week. Next week, we would talk what do we want product detail pages to look like? What do we want collection pages to look like? Should our explore menu look like this?
And when we were dissecting this, every single meeting I was taking notes. We were, and you’re aware of this, Kurt. We based our designs off of a mixture of three to four or four to five different websites, so we were picking apart other websites that we liked, and we incorporate pieces of those websites into our current site now that you guys built. So, it was two to three months of consistent conversation and from that point, that was when we really got the ball rolling with you guys where we were trying to set a date of when you guys would potentially start working on it, so I’d say probably from November through the end of January, I was just like head down, building out wireframes.
So, I used Figma for wireframes, and I did everything from building out what the homepage should look like, to product detail pages, collection pages, the cart drawer, the navigation menu, the announcement bars, so we really… When we were building out those wireframes, we were even taking in the assets that Luke already had, and we knew what we were going to be placing in all of these sections. So, it’s not like, “Hey, we want a video here. I wonder what it’s gonna be.” It was, “No, hey, we know what video exactly we’re gonna be using for each point of the website,” so that really helped bring it to life before there was even any type of testing model from you guys to get a first look at it.
Kurt Elster: Content, features, design. Which led the way? Which took priority in this process?
Craig LeBlanc: I would say content, design, then features. Without the content on this site, the features and design of it totally lose their strength.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And I want to reemphasize that, because you know, a lot of times we get designs, and we experience clients that have no content, so they just hand us design-
Kurt Elster: That’s the default.
Paul Reda: I mean, yeah. They hand us designs and they just kind of have like a lot of grey areas that’s like, “An image would go here.”
Kurt Elster: Yeah. We’ll figure that out later.
Paul Reda: Yeah, we’ll figure that out later. And so, it’s like okay, and then we kind of do all the work, and then they give us the images, or they don’t give us the images and it’s just like-
Kurt Elster: That section just has to go away.
Paul Reda: It’s like, “Why isn’t it done yet?” Oh-
Kurt Elster: We’ll do it later.
Paul Reda: We don’t know what’s gonna go there, so just delete it. Or then they give us stuff that won’t fit in the design because they never think through the content, and I was pleasantly surprised by you guys, because you guys had a lot of spaces where it’s like, “Well, a video will go here. Well, another video will go here. Well, we’re gonna have an image here.” And I’m like, “These fucking guys aren’t gonna make all this video. Bullshit.” Because I’ve been burned too many times in the past, but no, you came through.
Craig LeBlanc: Yeah. No, I mean we’re lucky, man. Luke is incredible at what he does and he’s ambitious with what he does, so his perspective on things is… I look at the brand a particular way, Trevor looks at it a particular way, and same with Austin, and Luke takes in like all of our perspectives and he kicks out some badass videos, man. Whether it’s our homepage header video, or the our story video that I just sent you guys yesterday. He’s been working on that one for months and it’s probably the best thing he’s ever produced. It’s awesome. So, he does a good job, and that… Like I said, content’s the number one thing, and then I think I said design, then features.
The design, I say design because I was very big on taking what other companies in the eCommerce space were doing, like a Dr. Squatch, or a Chubbies, or a Truff. We looked at those websites and we really loved what a lot of them offered, so we picked apart certain pieces from each spot and we incorporated it.
Kurt Elster: So, you identify like, “This is best in class stuff that would work for us,” so you know like, “All right, that’s what we want to work from. That’s our tools in our toolbox.” You’ve got the goal is better represent the brand and provide this really hyper-branded lifestyle experience, and then the content is what supports that. And you have… It’s the same person who does the product design, because it’s a lot of graphic design. The same person who does the illustrations and a lot of the graphic work on the site.
Craig LeBlanc: Yeah, so that’s another good point to go off of too, like we have all of that content, but then if you scroll throughout our site, our footer image, I think Austin, he saw something from Yee Yee Apparel that he really liked in their footer, so he mocked something up for us to incorporate into our footer. If you scroll down our product detail pages, certain sections, you see ice cubes dropping, so he’s incorporated ice cubes. So, when it comes to illustrations, Austin does all of our product development. Every funny ass shirt that you scroll through on the site, or sticker, he’s the one designing that along with the backpacks, and if you check out the illustrations, he’s doing that too.
Man, I can’t emphasize it enough the way that our group has clicked together in terms of an eCommerce company. We stay in each of our own lanes, and we fit the mold of what an eCommerce company really needs to run effectively without having to be at very large scale. So, we’re all… We’re fortunate that each of us click in our own lanes in that way.
Kurt Elster: Define those four roles for me.
Craig LeBlanc: Yeah, so I manage… I head up anything tech, so external or internal, so when you look at the website, or us getting onto Amazon, and getting set up with the certain requirements to make sure everything is functioning smoothly, like Gorgias chat integration for our support, Klaviyo for our email marketing, Emotive for our SMS marketing, I’m giving out free advertising here. But all of those integrations, that falls onto my plate.
The product development, so anything product related is Austin, so backpack coolers, stickers, t-shirts, that’s all Austin. Luke is everything content production, so any video that you see, any photograph that you see, that is solely Luke. And then there’s Trevor, who… Trevor is like he’s the jack of all trades within our business. Right now, we’re trying to go through and we’re really trying to take a big leap to becoming the next big cooler company, next big party cooler company, so we’re out there looking for rounds of funding and really trying to take that leap. Trevor’s the one that’s the face of the brand, so he’s getting out there, he’s having the important conversations, he’s the one that looks at all of our backend processes, and he looks at what Luke’s doing, what Austin’s doing, what I’m doing, and he ties it all together.
Kurt Elster: Did any of you have experience in this or has it been trial by fire?
Craig LeBlanc: When I first started working with SHITI Coolers, Luke was like a senior in high school or a junior in high school, so he would literally come out of school and we’d have meetings at this placed called… Man, this place. If you could look at what we’re working and where we’re at now, it’s just… It’s hilarious. But he would come in after school, he’d be a part of our meetings. He had an opportunity to go to college and do his thing with video production. He has aspirations to record movies and stuff like that, but he looked at what we have, and he was like, “I’m not gonna do that. I’m gonna commit everything I have to SHITI Coolers.” So, his background is just him doing all this on his own and he’s very big into learning, so he’s always consuming more and more information to improve his craft.
Austin, he’s always been a funny dude, and artistic, and just has that good sense of humor where he knows how to get people to laugh and bring it out of him, and I don’t know why SHITI Coolers did it with him, but it just clicked to where his designs, they just… They roll out with the brand, and they’re perfect, and he doesn’t have any background with Adobe Illustrator or any of this stuff. He just learned it all on the fly.
And Trevor went to school to be a physical education teacher and he actually was a teacher for… I don’t know. I want to say like seven years. So, Trevor, for most of the time, at one point he was working in a city called Grosse Pointe, which was… After work was like an hour commute, so Trevor would get out of school at like 3:00, whatever time it was, commute an hour, and then show up to the office and work till like 7:00. And so, every day, that was like his day.
Yeah, man. It’s been like… I can remember all of us meeting on Sunday nights, when that was the only time that we could all meet as a group, because we were all doing different stuff. So, the grind that we had to put in for three to four years before… We always knew it was working, but we had those moments where summer kicks ass, but then man, winter sucked when you’re just trying to be a cooler brand and you only have stickers. It's not fun.
So, there’s been a lot of transitions along the way from like we just transitioned our fulfillment out to a different provider in Chicago. We have all of our print on demand stuff at a provider in Northern Michigan. So, we’re-
Kurt Elster: Wait. Is that Chicago provider ShipBob?
Craig LeBlanc: It is. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: ShipBob. They sent me a sweater that just says Bob on it, but there was no indicating info on it, and so for months I would just wear this thing and had no idea where it came from. And it was just a… It was an amusing joke. My kids were like, “Who’s Bob?” Like, “I have no idea.” And months later I figured it out.
Craig LeBlanc: Veered off course there. To go back to the team, though, that was like the background of all of us, so when it comes to directly eCommerce, saying we went to school for this, and studied it, or that this was any of our expertise, it 100% was not.
Kurt Elster: This team did not have eCom business or marketing experience and succeeded handsomely.
Craig LeBlanc: Yeah. I mean, me and Trevor, me and him taught Facebook ads to ourselves and worked with each other to learn it. We ran our own ads for probably two years, so that’s how we managed the marketing side of it, was we just kind of learned as we went. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: You’ve done a tremendous job learning as you go, and experience is the best teacher, but want to talk more about this custom theme. And I want to hear about… There’s a lot of special features, intricacies, logic, some augmented reality, but I didn’t do the work. Paul, could you talk to this man about developing this theme?
Craig LeBlanc: Paul’s probably close to being done to talking with me, man. I’ve been all over Paul the last few weeks.
Paul Reda: Yeah, this is like a weird exit interview, because it’s sort of like I’ve spent the last three weeks wanting to kill myself, and now you’re like roping me back in, just to be like, “Well, talk about it more.” It’s like, “I don’t…” I spent most of last night sitting in the dark in my basement watching The Batman, and that was pretty accurate of how I was feeling after getting this site finally launched.
Craig LeBlanc: I don’t know if that’s a great thing or a bad thing.
Kurt Elster: You built a party cooler website and now you’re emo Batman in your basement?
Paul Reda: It could have been a party cooler website. It could have been a website for caskets. I would have felt the same way no matter what.
Kurt Elster: Wow. I don’t know what to do with that.
Paul Reda: No, I get too… I care too much, I think we determined is the problem, is I care too much, and then anytime anything is not 100%, I’m just like, “I’m a piece of shit and this is a piece of shit, and everything is horrible.” So, then I just become emo Batman. Kurt knows how fun I am to be with in the office.
Craig LeBlanc: In my past experience, I’ve worked with engineers on projects like this, so I got a gauge of what Paul was like to work with pretty quickly at the start, and in one of our meetings Paul just goes, “I just want to thank you for when I said no, not giving me a bunch of shit.” Like on one of the custom things that I asked, I go… It was a big ask and I knew that it was, and he just goes, “No.” And I said, “Okay.” And when he got on the call, he made a point of it to be like, “Thank you for not being a dick to me, basically, and trying to push for it when the answer was no.” So, I think a lot of it’s knowing your limitations with these custom developments, man. It’s you gotta ask questions, but you also have to know when you’re just wasting time and butting heads.
Paul Reda: Yeah. We were really pushing the edge of stuff. We were pushing the edge of my abilities. We were pushing the edge of what we could do in Shopify. And so, there was a lot of stuff where Craig was like, “What about this?” And it was one of those things where it was like, “All right, I could…” Some things were just, “No. That’s not technically possible.” And some other things were like, “All right, I could spend three days on this for a 10% chance of it working, so that’s also a no.”
Kurt Elster: You also have some features that are fragile, where it’s like it will work so long as nothing ever changes.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Craig LeBlanc: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And then like a content changes, or a new device width comes out, and suddenly like, “Oh, my layout doesn’t work anymore.”
Paul Reda: Yeah, yeah.
Kurt Elster: Well, so what are these bleeding edge features?
Paul Reda: Okay. Well, the opening bid for this website that you and I noticed, and we got obsessed with was in the design, the review stars are not stars. They’re ice cubes that are filled out. And we were like, “I wonder if we could do that. Does that even work?” I was like, “Well, if it’s stored in a metafield, I could pull the metafield, and then I can write code to figure out what the score is, and then put a transparency over a block of ice cubes depending on how high the score is,” and it was like-
Kurt Elster: You wrote your own custom review star widget.
Paul Reda: Yeah. We wrote… The opening salvo of this store was write your own customer review star widget so the stars could be ice cubes instead of stars.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, and run on top of the metafields that just are used by whatever review app.
Paul Reda: Okendo.
Kurt Elster: Okendo. Yeah, what’s nice is… I don’t know. Probably most review apps write the ratings for the app or for the product into the product’s metafields.
Paul Reda: Yeah, so you could just pull it.
Kurt Elster: And so, once you had that data, it’s like, “Okay, now how do I transform and manipulate that?”
Paul Reda: Yeah. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And then I think it was smart, because ice cubes are a recurring theme on this site, so that was one of the first things. You’re like, “The review stars are ice cubes. Is that even possible? It’s not possible.” And then like an hour later, you’re like, “I think maybe I could do it.” And then the next day you’re like, “Look, ice cube review stars.” And we were thrilled, because that really set the tone for this is… We’re gonna challenge ourselves and like 80% of the time it’s gonna work great.
Paul Reda: Yeah. That did set the tone and then it very much was like, “Hey, I saw this thing in the design. What the fuck is he doing? I can’t do that.” And then like an hour later, like, “All right, I think I can do that.” And then me 90% of the time actually able to do it.
Kurt Elster: I know. I was so excited about the review stars, and I showed my wife.
Craig LeBlanc: That was something at the start too, where it’s like we had those in the wireframe, but if you would have said no, I knew I was pushing the boundaries on that one to where I’ve never seen custom review stars like that, so when we kicked it off with that, I was like, “Oh, this is gonna go really smooth, actually.”
Paul Reda: Yeah. I don’t mean to harp on it, but it truly is the anecdote that personifies the entire project of what we ended up doing. So, for me, generally it started out as a standard thing. What we do when we build a custom theme for someone, we actually start with Turbo, because Turbo just has so many functions and features already plugged into it. Even more so than Dawn. Dawn is kind of meant to be the base theme, I feel like, that Shopify wants you to do, because obviously it’s free, it’s supported by Shopify, but as part of it being sort of the base thing, it doesn’t give you a lot of stuff out of the box, so in the hopes that you would kind of build your own if that’s what you’re doing, is you’d build your own features.
But we didn’t want that. We wanted to kind of be already halfway, with the race halfway done, so that’s why we always start with Turbo. And then it was just figuring out, all right, what things on this design are elements that already exist in Turbo that don’t need to be touched, elements that already exist in Turbo that I’m modifying, or things and sections that I’m entirely writing from scratch. So, you just break down the design page by page and block by block on every single page, and it’s like, “Okay, what am I doing here? What’s my starting point here? Do I do nothing? Do I just gotta change the font size? Or do I have to completely write an entirely new section from scratch?”
Kurt Elster: It sounds like your approach is to take the glacier that is the project and break it down into ice cubes.
Paul Reda: Ice cubes. Yeah, like I mean the menu… The header on the store, so the way that the standard Turbo… Just to give you an example, the way the standard Turbo header works is that there’s a desktop header, and Turbo actually annoyingly has a second header that it calls for mobile, and it switches it out, and because it started with a hamburger menu that flies out from the left in the design, that’s how the Turbo mobile header works, so all I did was completely disable and remove the desktop header and be like, “We’ll show the mobile header all the time.” Okay. Well, all right. Now we got our left side menu flying in. We got all that set up.
Okay, then I had to go inside that menu and rewrite it because the way that the interior of that menu worked in the design is completely different than the way it would normally work inside Turbo. So, it’s one of those things where it’s like the part you see initially, that was all just… That’s just the standard Turbo setup. But once you click on that menu, that’s entirely custom inside that menu.
Kurt Elster: It’s really… It’s a smart way of doing it because then there’s just so much work done for us already, but then it assumes you have to be a competent theme developer for this to work, because you have to be able to understand Turbo.
Paul Reda: And Turbo is an odd duck in a lot of ways, like there’s a… It’s existed for what, five years now? Maybe more?
Kurt Elster: Possibly more. I don’t know. A while.
Paul Reda: Yeah. We’re on version seven. And so, there’s a lot of weird ways it does things that you kind of gotta know this is what Turbo’s gonna do to me right now, and know how to screw with that.
Kurt Elster: Idiosyncrasies. So, you mentioned the menu. It always uses a mobile menu. There’s just always a hamburger menu. And then within the hamburger menu, it’s a little different, a little unusual.
Paul Reda: Well, yeah. To SHITI’s credit, they actually don’t have that many products in the grand scheme of things. I mean, do you know… How many product pages are on this store, Craig, would you say?
Craig LeBlanc: 70 to 80.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That makes life easier.
Paul Reda: I mean, I’m shocked it’s even that much. Yeah.
Craig LeBlanc: It’s mostly shirts, like there’s probably 35 shirts, I would say 25 stickers, backpacks-
Paul Reda: Two coolers. And I mean you truly only have four overarching collections. There’s coolers, add-ons, which are like plates, stickers, and apparel, and when you’re working with such a narrow, focused product catalog, you can really kind of get fiddly with it, because you don’t have to make these giant menus. Like remember a year ago when we were talking about the Minor League Baseball store, and the Minor League Baseball store has to have a menu that you can navigate 100 different Minor League teams, and then all the different types of products that those carry. Here, we only got four things, so that allows you to get real crazy with the design.
So, the initial thing when you see, when you open that menu, is just a collection switcher. And you can look at some products, like main products from the different collections on the store, and you could even put the products inside the menu.
Craig LeBlanc: Yeah. I think to go off of that point, Kurt, when you and I first started talking about this, you labeled it something really good that I didn’t know to label it as this, but you said… I said I just wanted to eliminate clicks. I wanted to make navigation as easy as possible. And you said, “Yeah, less click debt.” And now, yeah, when I look at our site, I just… I look at it in a sense of click debt to where people can get from start to finish significantly quicker than they could on our last site, which I think is a huge improvement.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I mean, that’s the main thing with the funnel. The concept of the sales funnel is that every page gets people closer and closer to buying. Well, if you can remove pages out of the middle of that funnel, they’re now closer to buying. The funnel’s narrower.
Kurt Elster: The other thing I like about this site as far as navigation goes, so if I open my hamburger menu, all things lead to product. That’s the first… The first 12 links are product, so it’s not a site where it’s like shop, and then about, blog, FAQ, where they do everything except the shopping nav. Drives me crazy, because it’s just an easy opportunity. And so, yours is clever. It goes product type, then a mega menu that’s three images, and it totally fits on mobile, for the coolers. That’s our hero category.
Paul Reda: Well, and because there’s only two coolers, so if you click on apparel or whatever, there’s even more product.
Kurt Elster: And then below that is shop by category in which you’ve themed things. Because the types are patches, stickers, t-shirts. And so, we’ve just passed April 20th, so there’s a 4/20 collection is the first one. I click that. And then what I think is clever, and more people should do this, because it’s not hard, once I’m shopping by theme and I’m on a collection, there is a sub nav at the top of the collection page to swap through the other themes. And so, it’s like we know by intent they’re shopping by theme, so now you’ve presented them with really a personalized menu for swap through themes, and it’s gonna swap through layouts that they’re already looking at and familiar with.
I don’t know how intentional this was, but I think it works incredibly well.
Craig LeBlanc: Yeah. We took this when we were researching sites, we took this one from Truff. So, I hadn’t ever seen this actually to where somebody could click into one collection and then within that same page, navigate to every collection. So, I just looked at it like you said and it’s like more people should do this. I just said, “Why aren’t we doing this? Why are we kicking somebody off of a collection page altogether when we can just load each of them within the same view?” So, that’s where we landed on that.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, it really… As far as sales funnels go, it’s incredibly clever, because I land on the site, and once I start shopping, you have to keep them browsing. And like IKEA knows this. IKEA is an intentionally byzantine layout because they know the more time you spend walking the store, the more likely you are to buy, and the higher your cart value will be. And so, we can do that on a website if we don’t have dead ends, and you’ve done that here by solving for that. There is no dead end here. Even if I’m in this collection and I don’t run into a product I like, I could just jump to a different category and keep going. Because even if I’m on something I don’t like, the stuff is so… It’s fun. It's irreverent. And if I’ve made it this far, I’m already a candidate to buy. I think all of that is quite clever.
Craig LeBlanc: I think something to point out too on these collection pages, we recently transitioned from a two by two to just a one by one on mobile, and I wasn’t fully convinced on doing this until Austin laid it out really clearly where I agreed with it 100% when he said it. You just think about the way people scroll on their phones now with Instagram and TikTok. Having a one-by-one display to give them the clearest look possible of that product undoubtedly in my mind is better than a two by two and trying to throw more at them with a smaller image. When people… They’re used to scrolling at this point, right? They’re used to that finger motion, scrolling through Instagram, scrolling through TikTok, so I love how this website turned out on collection pages when you get a one-by-one view of every single product, because you’re really zoomed in on it to where you know exactly what you’re getting with it and the quality of it.
Kurt Elster: Craig, this app, at least at face value… It doesn’t use a ton of apps. Are there any must-have apps in here?
Craig LeBlanc: Yeah. Honestly, we’ve done away with quite a few of our apps. We’re probably gonna go back to some of the Bold Upsell stuff. We’ve just… We loved upsells at first, but then we started to hate them because we felt like our website was too popup heavy, which we tried to incorporate things more subtly on this site. So, we might go back to like a Bold Upsell app.
I would say one of the most important apps that we have is the Back in Stock Notifications app, which I think you mentioned, it was one of the first apps to ever get released on Shopify, and I can’t emphasize it enough. Our backpack coolers, that’s our biggest struggle as a business right now is stocking the amount of backpack coolers with the amount of different variants as we want, but when we run out of a backpack cooler, we get one, two, three, four, 500 signups, more than that typically depending on what the variant is and how creative it is, but we put those things back in stock and we instantly have a huge day because we get… I would say we convert like 15 to 20% of those signups because they’re very highly qualified people, and we are never gonna convert an extremely high rate just within eCommerce. People are gonna lose attention, go somewhere else. Some people just become disinterested.
But we always get a good batch of people from that Back in Stock notification email or text message that goes out, because they support SMS signups, as well. And it converts really well, so like if you’re a store where you do ever run into inventory issues, you’re not fully print on demand, that’s one that no doubt you should have it in place.
Kurt Elster: The other cool app thing on here is AR, LevAR.
Craig LeBlanc: Oh, yeah. I completely… Is that how it’s pronounced or is it just Lev AR? I struggle with that. I want to ask the rep.
Paul Reda: It’s probably LevAR but LevAR is good too.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I’m a Star Trek TNG fan, so I see it-
Paul Reda: So, it’s LeVar Burton?
Kurt Elster: So, I see it and I’m just like LeVar Burton. Geordi.
Paul Reda: I think it’s like an alternate Mario Brother. It’s LeVario.
Craig LeBlanc: Yeah. Yeah, LeVario. So, to go off of this one-
Paul Reda: It’s me! LeVario!
Craig LeBlanc: This one was interesting because Trevor randomly took this call with this AR guy and he’s like, “Yeah, I think we could do something cool.” The guy, great sales pitch. They mocked up a G1 Patriot in augmented reality before we got on the call, so hook, line, and sinker, like just reeled us in right away, right? We jump on the call, we see this, and it’s one of those kind of a shiny object thing to where it’s like we gravitate towards it. We’re like, “That’s cool. How do we get it?”
But once we started to really think it through on the new site, we support AR only on one of our backpacks right now. Every version of the G1 that comes out is gonna have its own AR and we support it on our sticker 10-packs. So-
Paul Reda: So you can put the stickers on things you have.
Craig LeBlanc: Yeah, so-
Paul Reda: In the view.
Craig LeBlanc: Yeah, so the way it works, I sent it over to Kurt when we were in Ft. Lauderdale for an event. We had a perfect setting. We were right along this canal, or channel, whatever it is, and we were all just chilling out there drinking, and I pull up the site, and I click on the AR for the starter 10-pack for stickers, and takes control of your phone, says move your phone around a little bit so it can get a grasp for the surroundings, and we’re all sitting right there, and an old ass green Coleman cooler, which is like a staple of the brand, pops up in front of us on my phone with a 10-pack of stickers. And in that moment, we all just lost our shit because it’s like you come to the realization of how far the brand has come at that point where it’s like four or five years ago, we literally… We were just a sticker company.
Now, we have an AR version of this old ass cooler with a 10-pack sitting in front of us from our website on AR. So, I don’t know how well it’s gonna help us convert but it’s one of those things that as time continues to pass, I think AR… I feel like we’re somewhat of an early adopter within eCommerce. I don’t see too many people incorporate it the way we’ve incorporated it. They might have a button that says, “View it in my space,” but we’ve kind of taken it to the next level where you can rotate it on the product detail page, you can do all that cool stuff. But it’s definitely something, especially-
Kurt Elster: Yeah. The first time we played with it, it blew our minds. Paul pulled out his phone, immediately with ease dropped this virtual backpack on our table, and then I grabbed my backpack to see if it got the size right, and it did.
Craig LeBlanc: It did. Yeah. We actually went through like five iterations of that specifically for sizing, like we had to go back and forth. Size of the lid, size of the backpack itself, size of the patches on the side, size of the koozies. This company that we work with, man, they’re really good at what they do and it’s very affordable in terms of monthly just storage, or cloud hosting, whatever you want to refer to it as to manage all of these things.
Paul Reda: And it was just a drop-in on the theme, like I built out the section. It’s like okay, it had some text in the AR section on the product pages, so I put the text in there, styled it correctly, and I just made an empty .div, and just wrote in that .div like, “AR thing goes here.” And then they went into the theme, and they put in their embed. It’s just an embed to a link to their site. And it all loads on your store. It was just completely turnkey. At least from my end it was turnkey. It doesn’t sound like you guys did very much either.
Craig LeBlanc: No, man. We didn’t have to do much of anything. We just gave them theme access and they did their thing. It’s one of those things, do we think it’ll help conversion that much? No, but for the brand we’re trying to become, if out of… We get quite a few visitors every day, monthly, over the year. If we can get a small percentage of those people to have that wow factor that really… that sells it for them, and we really look at this, which I think other brands can latch onto this too. I wouldn’t assign it only to conversion value. We plan on making this a UGC way of producing content.
So, something that we’re gonna start doing is people within our group, like whether it’s me or Luke, if we’re sitting around the campfire, we can nonchalantly just pull up our phone and act as if anyone on TikTok or Instagram Reels would, like, “SHITI Coolers came out with this new badass 10-pack,” and we instantly just pull up the AR, throw it next to the fire that we’re hanging out at, and then we post it to Instagram and it’s one of those easy ways to start developing UGC content around your brand, so it unlocks a ton that we’re not even sure how we’re gonna capture the true potential of it right now, because it’s still early on, but we know we’re gonna be able to get value out of it from that aspect, too.
Kurt Elster: So, what’s next for the site? You did a lot, but there were some things we kicked to phase two. Anything cool coming in the future?
Craig LeBlanc: Well, probably by the time this gets published, we’ll probably have Luke’s video up there for our story. In terms of functionality, we just upgraded to Shopify Plus, so we’re gonna be working through some type of cool upsell at checkout. We just need to land on what type of product we want.
I mean, I love where it’s at right now. It’s functioning smoothly. Paul, you did a great job. It’s not buggy at all. I mean, it’s everything that we were looking for in it, and that’s why we were leading up to launch, and it’s like there’s some things that were nice to haves, and things that we needed, and we really did a good job of communicating through it to have almost all of the nice to haves and everything that we need, so I love where it’s at right now.
Paul Reda: I could talk about all the weird little crap I did on this site all day. Like all the videos, there’s actually two videos. There’s a mobile version and a desktop version.
Kurt Elster: Oh, yeah.
Paul Reda: But so the video doesn’t… It’s not running two videos at the same time, like a piece of JavaScript sniffs out the size of the viewport width and then injects a different video depending on whether you’re on desktop or mobile. The collection images, there’s one collection image, but the aperture around the collection image changes, so they’re a big, wide letterbox on desktop, but they’re more squarish on mobile.
Craig LeBlanc: Square. Yeah.
Paul Reda: I used the CSS aspect ratio rule a lot. It is my favorite thing on the planet. If you-
Kurt Elster: Saves a lot of headache.
Paul Reda: You can just responsively define, like hard define the size of anything, but you don’t have to do it in pixels, so it’ll work. You’re just like, “This should be 3:1. If the browser viewport is 2,000 pixels wide, it should be 3:1, and if the browser viewport is 400 pixels wide, then it should be one by one. It should be square.” And you just do all that and then the browser will resize that element according to those rules responsively, and I love it. I do it constantly on that site. Because Craig’s a fiddly little boy and I needed to do that.
Craig LeBlanc: One thing that I do love that you incorporated too that’s really clean on the dashboard side within Shopify is the nav thumbnails, like when somebody opens up that navigation menu, you added in a different layer to where we could have… You have the product photo as a fallback to where if somebody sees the G1 Patriot or they see a sticker pack, it can be just the regular product image. But we can also override that thumbnail and get a different type of thumbnail to show up in there, so the nav menu is really clean.
Paul Reda: There’s so many metafields on this site. Because you know, you just want to… You guys wanted to have such pinpoint control on every single element, and there’s just so many sections I was like, “Well, the FAQ section, that’s one image, right? Just for every FAQ?” And you’re like, “No, that’s gotta be different for every product.” It’s like, “Okay, that’s a metafield now. Have fun filling that out.” That was another thing where you guys completely came through. Every product on this store has like 15 metafields that need to get filled out, and it’s like, “They’re not fuckin’ filling out all these metafields.” Nope, you totally did. Like I’m pleasantly surprised at every stage of this project.
Craig LeBlanc: Yeah. I still have to go in and fill out for all the t-shirts, but everything else is pretty much good to go. But yeah, we had a lot of meetings, because we’re trying to eliminate a lot of support tickets, so we integrated Loop Returns in parallel with this entire job. We went over all of our frequently asked questions. We organized those from a product level to a collection level to a company level, so we were able to get that organized-
Paul Reda: You’re running Gorgias for the first time.
Craig LeBlanc: Yeah. We’re running Gorgias live chat for the first time, which instead of people saying… trying to reach out via email and feeling like they’re taking too long to respond, like they’re able to just open up a support chat right now and at least acknowledge themselves through a support chat on the site instead of having to open up an email composer, whether it’s Gmail, whatever the hell it might be, and go that route. So, we definitely… We wanted to make things way, way easier, be much more informative, get people the checkout quicker on the site.
Kurt Elster: Having gone through the process, anything you would have done differently? You can also say hell no, I did it right.
Craig LeBlanc: No. Yeah, I wish we would have done it sooner, but we just… We weren’t all full time to be able to dedicate the time to it, which I think if we would have tried to have done it sooner, it would have been a disservice to the job, because part of it would have been half-assed somewhere along the way. It definitely was a full-time commitment and no, I wouldn’t change anything. I love how it turned out. You guys did a great job working with us, communicating, and yeah. Killed it.
Kurt Elster: So, if I’m ready to get the party started, where do I go?
Craig LeBlanc: You go to SHITICoolers.com. You can check us out on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, any of those, as well. If you want a discount code, Kurt, I’ll get you to drop a discount code in the comments. I need to go into our… I should have one ready, but I don’t have my dashboard open right now, but we’ll drop a code to use so anyone that’s listening to this can go check us out and yeah, get a backpack cooler, deck out your old cooler with a sticker pack. We’re running a new BOGO 50% off t-shirts deal on the site that just launched with the new site, so stock up on some good t-shirts. The 4/20 Collection just rolled out and Austin killed it with some hilarious shirts and stickers. So, yeah, SHITICoolers.com.
Kurt Elster: Very cool. Craig, thank you so much for including us. We’re really proud of it.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I was just gonna say thank you, Craig. We are truly proud of this project. This is the best thing we’ve done in months.
Craig LeBlanc: That’s awesome. Love to hear it. I appreciate working with you guys too and obviously not going anywhere. We’ll be working with you guys here the next week, and month, and beyond that.
Paul Reda: We look forward to it.
Craig LeBlanc: Thanks, guys.