Behind the scenes of oVertone Haircare's project
In episode 400, we heard from veteran ecom investor Drew Sanocki that he'd acquired oVertone Haircare along with ecom powerhouse influencer Ezra Firestone.
In today's episode, our recent hire Tom Siodlak talks us through the behind the scenes experience of working with Ezra and the oVertone team on migrating the site from headless back to native Shopify with a custom theme. He reveals the premium theme we used as a framework, his thoughts on developing custom Shopify themes, design process, Online Store 2.0's impact, and more.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
5/3/2022
Kurt Elster: We’ve had a lot of exciting things going on lately, exciting for me as an agency owner, a Shopify partner, and what has powered a lot of our ongoing success this year has been hiring a full-time designer developer, a unicorn of a tech talented individual to find, and the reason I didn’t do this sooner, I desperately wish I had. Within weeks of hiring this man I thought, “We should have done this sooner.” I had a limiting belief around full-time employment, that somehow W2 employees were this monstrously complex, impossible thing to do. And that’s, of course, for anyone who’s done it, realized that’s very silly. But my point is we all have limiting beliefs and you don’t know what they are really until you’re passed them, and hindsight becomes 20/20.
But I bring this up because in episode 400 we heard from Drew Sanocki in the Lessons From 20 Years in eCommerce. And that, of our last five episodes, that is the number one. That was a really good, valuable episode. And among Drew’s many endeavors, he talked about oVertone hair care, a brand they’d acquired, and we had helped redesign. And I bring that up because this new designer we hired, Tom Siodlak, he’s the one who ran the project. He was the one who did it. And episode 402, we talked through our SHITI Coolers project with Craig LeBlanc and Paul. I want to do that again. We’re gonna get our oVertone designer here, Tom Siodlak. We’re gonna get Mr. Reda, my cohost, is going to talk to Tom about that project and how it went. And there’s a few other things in there we will cover, as well.
So, this is The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: And today, we’re talking design with a real-life designer. So, Mr. Tom Siodlak, how are you doing?
Tom Siodlak: Doing great. Thank you for having me.
Kurt Elster: You are here in the office. Where did you come from?
Tom Siodlak: South Florida. Yeah, so it’s a little colder here.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. We walked out the door and you said, “You guys aren’t wearing jackets?”
Tom Siodlak: I know. I’m wearing two jackets.
Kurt Elster: Sorry. You acclimate to it. To be fair, it goes the other way. As soon as I go to Florida, I just immediately… All of the water in my body ejects itself through my pores. Just like within 40 minutes it’s over and I turn into a husk.
So, how long have you been doing web design?
Tom Siodlak: Oh, so many years. I would say probably 12.
Kurt Elster: Oh, wow. All right, so we’ve been at this similar lengths of time. Do you have any formal education in computer science or design?
Tom Siodlak: Yeah. I went to college for art and design and went through like the graphic design program, and then once I graduated I was like, “Okay. Do I go work for a magazine,” which was a good thing I guess I didn’t, “or do I kind of go into web,” which was always a hobby of mine, to make fan sites for video games. And so, my first job out of school was building WordPress websites, and that’s before I even knew what Shopify was. And yeah, I just built simple WordPress websites, designed them, and then I got connected with you and you introduced me to Shopify.
Kurt Elster: And what’s interesting about that is we also had started with WordPress, discovered Shopify, and then said, “Wait a second. Why are we doing anything else?” So, on that topic, compare and contrast. What’s the thing that attracts you to Shopify as a platform from your perspective, from someone who has to do the work?
Tom Siodlak: Well, definitely the fact that it’s a hosted platform. When I built sites with other platforms, there was just so many things that could go wrong and you didn’t have a support team that was available to support the website. It always fell back to the web developer and certain things are just outside our skillset, like I don’t know about payment processing and things like that because I do design and development. But with Shopify, it’s nice that I get to just focus on the design and the development, and then all the eCommerce stuff is just taken care of.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. There’s so much more to it that that’s rolled up into your subscription fee with Shopify, that you’re no longer having to struggle with. That was our experience, where it’s like, “Well, we’ve got these WordPress sites out there. They just keep getting hacked.”
Tom Siodlak: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: No matter what you do, how hard you skirt, you still have to keep fighting against the client has it on a shared server. Yeah, I digress. I’ve got WordPress PTSD. We had worked together on several projects. There’s quite a few projects we’ve done together, but most recently you worked on this oVertone hair care project.
Tom Siodlak: Yeah, so it was a brand that I was already familiar with just from social media and following beauty gurus, and stuff on YouTube in the makeup and skin care, hair care industry, so I had already seen the brand, so when you brought it to me that we were gonna be working on their project, that was super exciting because I already knew about them.
Kurt Elster: And the first thing… It is always nice when the brand is familiar to you. A, it’s fun, there’s a little bit of like fanboy, you’re geeking out about it. Oh my gosh, I’ve seen this brand. I’m familiar with it. I’ve bought from it, or I’ve considered it, and now I get to work on it. I get to help them, and I get to see behind the curtain. And sometimes you discover, “Ew, this is how the sausage is made.” And other times you find, “Wow, these are really cool people.” And in the oVertone case, it’s a really fun team to work with.
Tom Siodlak: Oh, definitely. We loved everyone on their team. They were so structured with like their feedback, the entire process was smooth, and it was just like a… They have such a beautiful product, all their photography is amazing, that my goal was to just elevate that on the website and not overdo it, because we want the focus for customers to be on finding the correct hair care color that is best for them.
Kurt Elster: And the weird part about this thing, it was a headless site previously and had to come back to Shopify.
Tom Siodlak: It was a little confusing because we wanted to maintain some of their existing content and bring it into the Shopify platform, but there were no actual template files for us to access, so we had to kind of look at the existing website from the frontend and then take the content we wanted to keep and design that into new design mockups, and from there we built the website. So, there was many steps to getting to the website, but it really allowed us to kind of narrow down what are the most important pages on the website that they need for their customers, and we also were able to rethink how they organized the products because we’ve completely changed the menu system and how they organize products by collections, and product type, and colors, and stuff like that, so it gave us that opportunity to really rethink just from our best knowledge of how customers use websites, make such a great website for them.
Kurt Elster: So, over lunch… You, Paul, and I had lunch together, and you and Paul were going back and forth about this site and developing it, and he is just much more technically skilled than I am, and so in that moment I was trying to come up with questions and write notes and I realized, “You know what? This is really a section, a segment that you should be having this discussion with Paul.”
Paul Reda: Yeah, so they were headless, and one of the things with a headless setup that, again, I don’t think a lot of people understand, is when you want something to happen on the headless setup, you gotta go do that yourself. On Shopify, you’re kind of like, “Well, I want X on my site. I want Y on my site.” There’s probably an app that can do that or you just go into the template and just do a little thing that sets up the thing you want. Or, “Oh, there’s a Klaviyo. Klaviyo provides me with a snippet and I’ll just pop that snippet in the template and then we’re done.”
That’s not happening on headless. On headless, you gotta roll all of that shit all by yourself, and maintain it, and worry about that. So, when you’re talking about you wanted to keep the same functions that they had on the headless store, what did that mean for you? You were talking about their Klaviyo popups. What was the issues that you were running into for like normally how we would do things, you had to figure out what they were doing because they had a headless setup, therefore it was completely different. And when I say headless, what I mean is you have rolled your own server, and hosting, and built your website on platform, using libraries, and then you are just hooking into the Shopify API to do your checkout and do all your orders and that sort of stuff. The thing that a non-headless Shopify store is used to where it’s like, “Well, I go in my online store, and I’m in the Shopify backend, and I go in the templates, and I can add it to theme,” and that sort of stuff. That’s all not available to you. You’ve built your own entirely separate thing from that.
So, what were you seeing on their headless setup that was new or didn’t make sense to you I guess is kind of what I-
Tom Siodlak: Yeah, so I think the two things were, like you mentioned, the Klaviyo back in stock form. So, on the product pages, actually the back in stock form relates to the product variants, which is the second thing, so on the product pages there would be that notify you if the product is out of stock and you want to sign up to be reminded when it’s back in stock. And the issue was that the products that came in two sizes, only one size was technically assigned to that product. The second size was pulled in from another product SKU.
So, when we installed the back in stock button that would allow people to sign up to be notified when the product’s back in stock, the Klaviyo button wasn’t able to just work out of the box because the second size didn’t really exist on that product. So, the way that we really got around that was by restructuring how they handle their variations for their products.
Paul Reda: So, yeah. We had to pretty much redo their entire product catalog, because they had it set up, and I have seen this a lot on a lot of apparel stores where they’ll have a main shirt that’s like, “This is the cool shirt we sell,” and then when you change the colors of that shirt, it’s actually on the variant switcher, on the product page, when you’re changing the color, it’s not switching to a new variant. It’s actually loading an entirely different product in that page.
Tom Siodlak: Right.
Paul Reda: Now, I’m not sure why a lot of stores do that. I think it might be for SEO juice. I’m not sure if that actually works or not. But it sure makes things a hell of a lot harder.
Tom Siodlak: Yeah. And then another thing related to that was let’s say you’re looking at the hair care the color of red, red comes in pastel, vibrant, and extreme, so those different tones for that color of red are really not connected in any way on the Shopify product edit screen. So, that was something that you helped me build where we were able to come up with a solution so when you’re looking at the red pastel, you see the related red vibrant and red extreme, and that’s not something that we were able to just look at the headless site and see how they did it. We had to come up with our own way to write that with Liquid.
Paul Reda: It was almost one of those things where their product catalog was so messy, but the fact that they had such pinpoint control on headless, that allowed them to still survive with such a messy product catalog. But it was still very confusing. It was confusing for them to maintain it because as you were saying, all the reds are sort of together, but they’re all separate products. But then you said they had different sizes, and like the two-ounce sizes were treated as we would think of as a normal product, where it was just one item that was two ounces and then all of the variants were in there as one would normally do it.
So, it was like they didn’t even have a consistent system, and moving back to the Shopify templating language on the one hand meant we had to redo their product catalog, but on the other hand it made their product catalog make way more sense and be much easier to expand, and add new products, and manipulate that data in a way that makes the site easier to run.
So, rolling back here, you got this job to do oVertone, so where did you start? What is your first move? How do you tackle this?
Tom Siodlak: Yeah, so when we first started, we didn’t know all those things. Those were things that we tackled along the way.
Paul Reda: And you couldn’t be like, “Well, I’ll just load up their current theme and see what’s going on in there.”
Tom Siodlak: No.
Paul Reda: There is no current theme.
Tom Siodlak: Exactly. When you go to the online store themes and you click either customize or edit code, there just is none. So, I first started with design mockups because for brands that we really need to elevate the design and scale it back, but also add in some new things, if it’s within the timeline and the scope of the project, I like to present them a design mockup. That way they can leave comments on it and then we can go, and we can change it without having to actually code anything. Because it’s a lot faster to just move things around the design file than to do that all with code.
So, I designed all the major pages, which was the homepage, the about page, contact, FAQs, the product page, and there were some additional pages that their team wanted, such as like a guide page, which just explains how to use their hair care products, and I just designed it with best practices, things that I really thought would be great for their brand, and then their team was just amazing. They just left… They actually didn’t really have me change too many things. It was more of just like we, “We think this would be a good idea. Can we do that?” And the answer was always, “Yeah, that really makes sense. Let’s do that.”
And especially on mobile, I really love the mobile header that they gave feedback on, and so after we moved from the design mockups to building the theme, I think we came up with a really nice mobile header that has a shop icon, the off-screen canvas. We really thought the way that the dropdowns are and all the way that the products are categorized. We did that for desktop too. There’s a brand-new mega menu that I think is really easy for people to find what they’re looking for, because people may not be familiar with the brand. They may or may not be, so we kind of want to cater to both people.
Kurt Elster: And you say, “Hey, we’re getting some client feedback,” and you explained. You presented them with the design in a mockup and said, “Hey, this is what I’m thinking, but also here’s the design thinking behind it.” And their feedback was largely, “That makes sense, let’s go with it.” But some of your feedback were screencasts from none other than Mr. Ezra Firestone, the guy who provides the Tech Nasty sound clip.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: Was that nerve wracking at all when the client in the feedback is this gigantic eCommerce influencer?
Tom Siodlak: Well, I recognized his name right away, but I just thought that was super cool because he sent me… I believe it was a Loom video and he just walked me through. He said he liked the designs, and he just gave some great feedback on things that we can do to increase conversions, so I agreed with everything. I was like, “That makes sense. Let’s put a call to action there. Let’s move some stuff higher up on the homepage just to get more views on it.” So, yeah, I thought those were all really great ideas.
Kurt Elster: This project initially… This existing successful website, it’s using Shopify but it’s given up the online store for this headless platform that will go unnamed, mostly because I forgot which one it was, and then we had to move this thing back into Shopify, but the headless thing was so bespoke, we really couldn’t see into the code, and it just wasn’t worth the effort to figure out how to work that. But we could see the design and we could see the branding and we could see the content. And I think that was part of the success here, is you’re working with an existing site where you know the content works, but you know the struggle is in design and maintaining it, so oh, let’s rethink that and work it back.
Do you think a redesign like that, is that easier or harder than a new store, new brand?
Tom Siodlak: I think they both have their own challenges, but I do think it was good that we didn’t know all the technical details behind everything because it allowed me to just focus on the design. And so, for example, on like the collection pages, where we have the filter bar on the left menu, I really wanted people to be able to filter by color, by collection, and also by product type, and there really wasn’t a way to do that just out of the box with Shopify, but because we designed it and we thought that it would really elevate the customer experience, we went and we built it. And I just think it’s best when customers can go to the website, and they can kind of filter down exactly what they’re looking for.
Kurt Elster: Well, certainly the KPIs prove that concept, and I agree with you. I think the advantage of filtering is you really help people eliminate analysis paralysis by… If you have a big catalog, give people the tools to filter it down how they want to, “These are the things I’m looking for.” And then suddenly I’m not choosing between 400 items. I’m choosing between four and it’s just a much easier thing to do.
So, we’ve got existing site, headless, and we’re undoing it. It’s like half a migration, right? It’s like a custom theme is what you built, but then also we’re doing a little bit of migration in that we have to reorganize the catalog in Shopify to make this thing work. What was the timeline here? How long did this thing take?
Tom Siodlak: You’d have to refresh my memory, but I think we started it in February and ended it end of March? I feel like it was a two-month project.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It was about… It was eight weeks and maybe a little shorter, but I think it was quick given that it’s custom design with mockups, custom development, and a thing none of us had ever done before. None of us had ever been like, “All right, let’s go undo a headless store.”
Tom Siodlak: Yeah. And just along the way, even after we completed the design and built out those pages in the new Shopify theme, other things came up where there were other collections that needed landing pages, because it just felt like we were neglecting those if we didn’t also prevent those in the best way possible.
So, for me, I wanted to build things in a way that their team can go in and still customize everything, like we’re there to support them if they have changes to the website, but they also can go in and edit any text, image, color. We made use of the Shopify 2.0 stuff, so it’s all sections, and even the metafields, so just editing a collection, they can assign a top banner. Actually, there’s two banners and additional text for each collection, so we really tried to give the oVertone team access to customize it if they want to.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. What’s interesting about this is from what I understood, the reason the site was on headless was largely, “Hey, we want more flexibility in the CMS.” And then it turned out really it became cumbersome, burdensome, like it was overly complex, and it was really too difficult to figure out, plus the additional limitations on headless, and then the big draw, I think, for a lot of people to headless is it’s supposed to be faster.
Tom Siodlak: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: But as soon as you throw a whole bunch of JavaScript on there for apps, and tracking, and tags, and all that stuff, it goes the other way.
Tom Siodlak: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: It doesn’t end up being… You lose a lot of that advantage. I had wanted to ask you about online store 2.0, because I feel like we are… Online store 2.0 rolled out not that long ago and I feel like only recently are we seeing themes that really take advantage of it, and then with the addition of these new metafield types and support that Shopify has added, now suddenly in the last 60 days, I feel like now I’m comfortable and I’m feeling the advantages of online store 2.0.
What are some of the differences there that you gain with OS 2.0?
Tom Siodlak: Well, let’s say with the original online store, if you had… Most themes came with just a details page, which you might assign to your about page. Now, if you then want to go create another page in the customize tool where you could drag and drop different elements, you’d have to go into the theme and then duplicate the details template, create a new one, and then you’d be able to use that template for your new page. But the problem is that let’s say you want to add a custom section. If you want to do it across all of your themes, you would have to go paste that section code into all your templates, and that just becomes so hard to manage, but with the new way that the templates and the sections work, it's all done through the customize tool, which is really nice.
And I also like that when you go into the theme code and you build a section, something custom, you can use it throughout the store, whether it’s on the homepage, about page, or one of your other templates.
Kurt Elster: That’s Sections Anywhere.
Tom Siodlak: Yes.
Kurt Elster: All right. Yeah. That feature gives us a lot of flexibility. Online store 2.0 themes use .json templates instead of Liquid. Any feelings around that? I know the advantage is like it’s a little faster, it’s a little more portable.
Tom Siodlak: Not so much for me. It’s just been… I still like that I can create the new templates in the customize tool without having to always go into the website code.
Paul Reda: And so, when you started, when you’re making this, you didn’t write all these templates from scratch, right? What did you use as a base?
Tom Siodlak: We started with a theme that we felt would be a really nice groundwork for the oVertone website, and then from there I customized the heck out of the header, the footer, and I created my own sections that are used throughout the site. So, some are out of the box theme sections, and then others are one that I designed and coded for them. But everything can be customized, so they could always edit the text, the images, and colors.
Paul Reda: What was the base starting theme?
Tom Siodlak: It was Flex.
Paul Reda: Oh, okay. I don’t know. I’m asking.
Tom Siodlak: Oh, yeah. Oh, no, no, no. You’re right. It was Focal. You’re right. Yeah, so we use Flex a lot, but we wanted to try something different with oVertone.
Paul Reda: All right, so vote for Focal. I assumed it was Turbo because that’s what I always use, but okay.
Tom Siodlak: No, no, no.
Paul Reda: So, you used Focal as the base, and then you built it… There’s custom elements, a ton of customizations really built on top of Focal is how we got here.
Tom Siodlak: Yeah.
Paul Reda: Yeah, so you’ve used Flex, Focal, and Turbo. Thoughts in between them? What’s better? What’s different?
Tom Siodlak: Pretty much every website, I always used Turbo, and then there were some times when I would use Flex, and I would think that I was just so used to Turbo, the way I had to shift my brain for Flex, I wasn’t so comfortable with that. But with Focal it just seemed so much easier, and I liked the way that they styled the section options, so it was just very easy for me to take their sections and make my own and style it. That would be my preference to continue using on other projects moving forward.
Paul Reda: Is Focal?
Kurt Elster: What?
Paul Reda: What? No. Turbo only. No other themes.
Sound Board Robot: Oh my God.
Paul Reda: But so why was Focal better than Turbo for you?
Tom Siodlak: I just think out of the box it was really pretty, so it just started, it looked great right away, and there were just a lot of great options in the theme settings. I didn’t have to fight the theme settings to change too much.
Paul Reda: Yeah, like those Turbo color… That Turbo color section where they’re like, “We let you swap every color,” and makes no sense what is attached to what, so I just end up ignoring it and just writing it all myself in the CSS file. But it’s like, “Yeah, we’re supposed to be able to pick that easily, but I have no clue what applies to what.” They just dump it. It’s like it has all the options but it just barfs them all out at you in one giant pile.
Tom Siodlak: And also even on the product page, when you’re scrolling down, the sticky header scrolls with you. But then there’s another header which is just to add the product to your cart, so as you’re scrolling down the product page you’re kind of seeing that, like the price, the image, and the add to cart button, and so I like things like that because it just encourages more people to buy, when that’s just not something that comes with those other themes.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I didn’t… So, yeah, built in sticky add to cart on the product page, that’s something we get a lot of requests for from people, and so that’s got it right out of the box. That’s cool.
Kurt Elster: Hold on, you two. I just… The latest version of Turbo is 7.1.something. I just used that on two projects, and I love it, and I don’t care what you say about its gigantic list of color options, that gives me all the rope I need to be able to make this thing work. I love it.
Paul Reda: Did I not say on SHITI last week that I use Turbo as my base?
Kurt Elster: That’s true. The most recent custom theme we launched was on Turbo. All right. Good. When discussing a project like this, you have to discuss the results. What KPIs moved? What happened here? What was the fantastic results of this? And one of the unfortunate parts of headless is it’ll break a whole bunch of the analytics and reporting inside Shopify. Now, I don’t know if this is true for every implementation of headless, but at least in this particular experience that was the case. So, I really don’t have particular KPIs that we could share for this, which is super frustrating.
Yeah, like looking in the Shopify analytics like for online store, it claims to be up currently 3.6 million percent, which I know is a reporting error, and so what we’re gonna do… I wish I had it in time for this episode. I don’t. But we’re gonna get with the oVertone team and our case study copywriter extraordinaire, Meg Cumby, and work out a case study for this that we could share and have proper vetted stats for this. But unfortunately for this I don’t, which is a little frustrating, honestly, and it’s just… It’s one of the things that you have to work around when changing platforms like this with replatforming.
And even though the site was always on Shopify, the online store itself, we changed platforms, and so it’s like half a replatforming. I don’t know.
Tom Siodlak: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: I think what’s interesting about this is this isn’t the only request we’ve had for, “Hey, we’re Shopify headless and we want to move back to Shopify native.” There were at least two others. One project I wrote a proposal for and they went with somebody else, which is fine. It happens. And the other I don’t know what happened with, but I heard multiple people having this discussion. It’s kind of interesting. Everyone ran to the shiny toy over the last two years, which was a headless site, whether or not it necessarily made sense for them. And certainly, there are instances where it does, but in this case it’s like, “Look, it’s causing us more headaches than benefits, so let’s simplify that tech stack and make our lives easier.” And so, it made sense here.
Any other thoughts on oVertone? Because there is something else I would like to discuss.
Tom Siodlak: Just loved working on this project. I love their team and I’m just super proud of it.
Kurt Elster: Are you gonna dye your hair? oVertone sells hair dye.
Tom Siodlak: I know. You know, now that I got a haircut it’s not as extreme if I wanted to change it up.
Kurt Elster: I could picture like a… I want a Cyberpunk color. We need blue, purple.
Tom Siodlak: Right? Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Something fun. And speaking of Cyberpunk, the other super cool thing that you worked on with us this year, redesigning our agency website, Ethercycle.com. You redesigned that and I showed it to Andrew Youderian last week from eCommerceFuel and he was like, “Your design is great! This site looks like Tron.” All right, I’m paraphrasing, but I think that’s what he said. And I was so thrilled with that because that really was the creative brief. I was like, “It’s gotta look aggressive eighties Cyberpunk aesthetic, but we knew as a lead gen site it worked really well as a lead gen site, I just… To me it felt a little dated. Everyone’s the most critical of their own website. I wanted you to be able to flex your design skills and so I just let you go wild on it and this thing’s awesome! It is so cool.
Tom Siodlak: Thank you.
Kurt Elster: Talk to me about it a little bit. What do you like about it? What’s crazy about it?
Tom Siodlak: I mean, again, we started with design mockups, so that just allowed us to kind of be more creative with it, and I wanted to bring in darker colors with very bright text. We have a lot of gradients going on, a lot of hover effects, and I wanted to have animations, so like when you’re on the homepage, at the top there’s stars in the back, and there’s a TV that changes the channel, that kind of talks about different benefits you’d get from working with us, so for me it was like showing our personality in that it’s fun, it’s funky, and we want to delight you as you’re stopping by the website.
Kurt Elster: I love this idea. This has been an aesthetic I’ve always been into, being a child of the eighties, but it also… It’s on trend right now. Thanks, web 3.0, which that scares me a little. I don’t want to be trendy.
Sound Board Clip: Eww!
Kurt Elster: But the other thing is like I had never really gone through a proper branding exercise, and I feel like it took us 10 years to get here, but finally we have really pulled all of the branding and aesthetic together, and it just feels really good. So, congratulations to you on being able to pull this off. It’s really quite extraordinary. And for listeners, if you’re in that position where you’re like, “I want to elevate my brand. I want it to look more polished.” I think that’s where you look to as like, “All right, can we develop?” Start with a logo and brand guidelines. And if you get to like logo, brand guidelines, and really define what that brand aesthetic is in a way where I was able to communicate it to you with a creative brief and then we had the content already. I said, “I know the content works. Let’s just reuse it.”
And just giving you really those two things and then free reign. I got out of your way and really only gave very minimal feedback. Because I’ve been on the receiving end. I’ve worked with clients for a decade. I know what it’s like and I know that some of the best work is when you really minimize meddling. And so, I just let you run with it and put your stamp on it, and it absolutely works. I’m just really thrilled with it.
Tom Siodlak: Thank you.
Kurt Elster: And so, people should check it out. I think it’s cool and I hope it inspires people to do their own rebrands with it.
Tom Siodlak: Yeah. Definitely.
Kurt Elster: And then the other thing you ended up doing for us was helping us polish up our apps in the app store, so like CrowdFunder is my baby. That’s our big app. Just hit 500 installs. Very proud of that, as well. And with that, you were able to really clean up not just the apps and their interface, and the onboarding processes that they use, but also the app listings. And I think that had a really positive impact on helping us hit that 500 app installs mark for the first time. So, again, congrats to all of us on that.
Sound Board:
Tom Siodlak: Thank you. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: But going forward, we’re gonna do more of these postmortems with clients, with you, and we’ve got some exciting projects coming up. A backpack apparel brand I hope we’ll be working with soon. We’ve got some automotive clients lined up. That’s always been one of my passions, so we get a lot of aftermarket automotive people in here. And hopefully we’ll come up with some interesting content, as well. But Mr. Siodlak, thank you so much not just for being here and for doing the podcast with us, but also for… You approached me. You said, “Hey, I would love to work with you and work at Ethercycle.” And you got me past that limiting belief, so thank you so much.
Tom Siodlak: Thank you. Thank you, guys.
Kurt Elster: That concludes this episode of The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I’d love to hear your thoughts. I’d love to hear from you. We answer questions from just random strangers every day in our Facebook group, so please join our Facebook group. Search for The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders and come talk to us.