Fish-Field

Fish-Field was opened in 2008, and quickly became the go-to spot for everything fishing in the pacific northwest. Dedicated to carrying high-quality, pro-level fishing gear and tackle, Fish-Field was in a class of their own. Fast forward to 2020, the world falls apart, and suddenly running a brick and mortar fishing store becomes a struggle. So Fish-Field was faced with a choice, close the doors or pivot to an online retail business.

Fish-Field launched their online store on Shopify mid 2020, and things were looking up. But they quickly realized that running an online business was worlds apart from running a brick and mortar.

Fish-Field

employer

Ux Design, Ui Design, Ux Research, Information Architecture, Branding, Marketing, Photography, Web Development

my role

Figma, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Shopify, BigCommerce, LuckyOrange, Google Analytics

tools

2021 - 2022

years

introduction

fish-field

Before my involvement, Fish-Field’s website and marketing tasks were divided between the owner and the general manager, neither of whom had experience in web design, development, or maintenance. Consequently, the website was user-unfriendly, and made it difficult for customers to find the products they were looking for. Despite these challenges, Fish-Field experienced a successful year.

As 2020 drew to a close, Fish-Field saw promising signs of growth and stability, alleviating their worries of having to close their doors. However, they recognized the need to rebuild their website, refine their information architecture, and enhance their marketing efforts to sustain their business momentum. This is where my role began.

gathering insights

fish-field

I am not a fisherman; I've never even been on a boat.

This forced me to work quickly to understand our users, our products, and the industry within which we existed.

After a few weeks of working in the store, speaking with customers, and asking questions, I had formed a pretty good understanding of our users. Additionally. with the use of both Lucky Orange analytics, and user surveys, I had gathered a great number of insights on friction points, and potential improvements.

Sessions by device types.

When we look at the average sessions by device, over the entirety of my time with Fish-Field. It’s immediately evident that our main focus was making sure that Fish-Field was optimized for our over 60% mobile user base.

2021 - the shopify era

fish-field

The Shopify Era

We were happy with the newly renovated Shopify website, and quickly began to see the data, and the customers affirmed the work that I had done. But we also knew that it was only a band aid, after years of neglected maintenance, poor management, and mountains of poorly maintained product inventories, images, and information, we knew we needed to start over from a clean slate to really make the most out of our website.

I wanted to make sure that this redesign, wasn’t a a big departure from the outgoing website, just a more refined version, that would adhere to web conventions, and that products and important pages would be easier to find for users.

the shopify results

fish-field

The Shopify Results

Sales

+49%

Conversion Rate

+54%

Average Order Value

+8.65%

2022 - A new beginning

fish-field

We felt like we had hit the ceiling with Shopify. Fish-Field carries over 20,000 products, and gets new products every week, so after much deliberation we decided to move platforms to Bigcommerce, and integrate Skuvault, a robust inventory management system.

With so many products, and a history of chronic inventory issues, it was extremely important to get our information architecture perfect. I gathered information architectures from many of our competitors, to get a rock solid understanding of how we could structure our own navigation in the simplest, most effective way.

2022 - The Bigcommerce era

fish-field

The Bigcommerce Era

The move to Bigcommerce really pushed my skills as a designer, and as a developer. You may notice that there were no wireframes in this case study. As I was the sole developer, I had to figure out the design as I went along, because I was constrained by my own developing skills. Although it’s not an ideal process to go through, it forced me to be much more agile and intentional with my work.

I touched every single product page to make sure we had high quality, optimized images, accurate descriptions, and correct specification tables. When needed I would shoot my own product photos to make sure we had a consistent look between all product images.

Midway through building the new website, I was also asked to create new branding.

Fish-Field

I am not a fisherman; I've never even been on a boat.

Sessions by device types.

The Shopify Era

The Shopify Results

Sales

+49%

Conversion Rate

+54%

Average Order Value

+8.65%

We felt like we had hit the ceiling with Shopify. Fish-Field carries over 20,000 products, and gets new products every week, so after much deliberation we decided to move platforms to Bigcommerce, and integrate Skuvault, a robust inventory management system.

The Bigcommerce Era

The Bigcommerce Results

Marketing Sales

+161%

Conversion Rate

+54%

Average Order Value

+8.65%

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