RipSkirts are eye-catching, versatile, wrap skirts made with a soft, supple, water-shedding fabric. They pack small, dry quickly, and are wrinkle-free. RipSkirt is a terrific scratch-your-own-itch success story—originally created because the founder was in search of such a product but couldn’t find anything suitable. So, like all great entrepreneurs, she set out to do it herself.
RipSkirt approached us because they had been growing rapidly and were doing most of their website work themselves. They had a wonderful product line but their website wasn’t performing as well as it could—and wasn’t doing a great job of clearly telling their story or making it easy for visitors to browse their colorful range of products.
We started with a complete content architecture overhaul—exploring and understanding the range of products, how they are organized, and how customers shop. We wanted to make it easier for customers to browse and cross-browse to help them understand how the products are categorized and help them find what they are looking for.
Once we had a clearer picture of the content, we worked through a series of wireframes refining and improving user-flows and conversion paths before moving onto high-fidelity visual mockups. From the outset, we knew we wanted to bring vibrancy and color into the site to reflect the fun, playful nature of the RipSkirt brand—something that was not well-reflected in the previous site.
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A lot of the sites we work on these days have non-linear paths to purchase—in that the customer might find their way to a particular product to then realize there is a different version or variation of that product.
The more traditional way to deal with this in Shopify is with variants. The problem with variants is that it is difficult to merchandize them separately in collections and landing pages—not to mention the challenges around how to best showcase beautiful lifestyle imagery and messaging and storytelling specific to each variant.
A more common approach we are taking—and the way we handled it with RipSkirt—is to break variants out into separate products while then “combining” them on the product detail page so they look and behave like variants. This enables us to fully merchandise them individually through the site and craft their unique storytelling and messaging, while also creating a seamless experience for browsing without unnecessary dead-ends.
Further, we have added a number of elements like “model is also wearing” and “commonly bought with” to further enhance the cross-browsing experience. We also provided “short cuts” to switch between skirt lengths without needing to leave the product detail page.