Digital Transformation and website launch for Paw.com

Project Overview

Born as a highly successful Facebook Group paired with a basic web store - Treat A Dog grew into a multi-millionaire dollar business designing and manufacturing high quality pet products. With the launch of their new product line - PupRugs and PupProtector blankets - they sought to transform into the first pet-focused interior decor brand worthy of a new million dollar domain: paw.com

Dave Gimes, founder of paw.com, came to us to lead this digital transformation.

To deliver on their promise of creating innovative pet products that make you and your pet truly feel at home together, we designed and engineered a bevy of unique user interface elements, crafted a branded story, and built special features that would drive product discovery and average order value.

Defining Goals

After performing a deep user experience and analytics audit of the Treat A Dog storefront, we immersed ourselves in the brand and the product line - reviewing thousands of pieces of customer reviews and content, and the roadmap for Paw.com.

Armed with this information, we came up with some guiding principles for the digital transformation:

• The more photos customers saw of Paw products in homes, the more likely they’d be able to picture it in their homes, the more likely they were to buy.
• Elevate and highlight the bevy of user-generated content. People love sharing photos of their dogs. As such, paw.com has no shortage of happy dogs on their products. Let’s highlight the happy customers. Additionally, Paw.com has over 20,000 5 star reviews. Let’s use them.
• Drive average order value. Paw.com has a visionto be in every room in your home with multiple products for different use cases
• Showcase product quality. Paw.com designs & manufacturers premium products. We need to ensure the website emphasizes and explains the Paw.com difference.

Homepage Breakdown

Homepage breakdown: Paw.com sells home goods products and our strategy was to show the product in-home as much possible. The hero image on the homepage focuses on a larger-than-life shot of the PupRugs in-situ. Product cards are always large and focused on lifestyle photography - no standard white-background e-commerce photography.

A key part of the brand story is a true love for pets. Dave treats his pooch, Marlie, like a family member - and a business partner. She tests every bed and product herself in the Paw.com office. If it’s not Marlie approved then it doesn’t hit the online store. To visually represent this, we implemented heart animations and infused dog-friendly photos everywhere on the site.

User generated content gets exposed in multiple places on the homepage: right below the hero and in two other key sections.

• A curated reviews section highlighting happy pups
• A curated instagram section highlighting customer posts

PDP Breakdown

A product detail page that highlights the goods. Paw.com’s flagship product line is the PupRug - a line of premium quality, orthopedic memory-foam dog beds with washable and reusable covers - different from all other products on the market.

So, we designed and implemented visual elements on the collection page and product detail page that highlights these key components.

• During our research, we discovered that customers often misjudged the product size and this resulted in a common pattern of discontent in reviews. After reviewing on-site search results, we also discovered that people were frequently searching for products by dog breed. To address this we:
• Included the dimensions in the product variant titles
• Included model specifications (using an adorable dog model) like breed and weight to collection pages
• Added a SIZE GUIDE feature to PDPs that explained size options in more detail
• Included a specific DIMENSIONS section on PDPs to allow customers to understand the size even further

Boosting Average Order Value

Paw.com has a bold vision to fill every pet-owner’s home with beautiful, functional products that you don’t have to hide in a corner.

A cornerstone of interior design is finding complementary products and patterns that can create a certain aesthetic. Paw.com knew this when they launched their PupProtector Waterproof Throw Blanket - a washable, reusable throw blanket that protects your couch or bed. The designs were made to match their best-selling line of PupRugs.

Introducing in-home bundles.

We worked with Paw.com to introduce curated bundles to their product line pairing matching beds and matching blankets.

While this worked well, we doubled down and wanted to offer this at another point in the buying journey - the cart.

Using our metafields app, Airfields, we developed a system that lets Paw.com choose a matching upsell product to offer in the cart for every product variant in their store.

Once selected, the system will show the corresponding upsell product right in the cart.

In addition to this, we’ve introduced a free shipping bar, to incentivize increasing AOV and UPT, that tells customers when they’ve unlocked free shipping after reaching a certain cart value threshold.

Our focus on building these features has helped contribute to a 29% increase in average order value year over year.