S15 E6: Website Design Lessons From the Best Brands

0:00Welcome back to Limited Supply, the podcast where we get deep into the tactical and strategic side of e-commerce, digital marketing, and building consumer brands. I'm your host, Nik Sharma. I've spent the last nine years building, scaling, and investing in brands. And through this show and my weekly newsletter at nik.co slash email, I'm here to share everything I've learned. The wins, the losses, the experiments, the tactics, and the insights, all so you can unlock your next$100 ,000 in revenue. Today's episode is a good one, but before we dive in, let me tell you about our chosen sponsor for this week's episode.

0:34Nik:If you're a Shopify brand, pay attention. Roku Ads Manager is built for growth marketers and makes connected TV way easier to test. Go to advertising.roku.com slash limited supply. All right, welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. Today, we're going to do something fun. This is something I've had on my list for a minute. it. And, um, you know, it's funny, most of the content I put out, the most engaged stuff is obviously it's always very tactical, but if you were to break it down between different parts of e-commerce, whether it's ops logistics product, which I don't really talk about too much, it's not my area of expertise.

1:13I can hold a conversation, but I'm not the guy you want to consult with on 3PL stuff, for example. Um, but you know, the most talked about stuff is really, or the most engaged with stuff is websites, landing pages, ads, creators, influencers, funnels, CRO. And so I thought today, why don't I go through eight different websites, maybe more, maybe less, depending on time. And today's episode, I want to spend it basically on full websites. I want to go through what do I like from these websites as I scroll and go through these sites. I'm somebody who's seen an insane amount of websites, have built an insane amount of websites for a variety of brands, whether it's POV Beauty, whether it's IM8, whether it's Parachute Home, whether it's David Protein, whether it's Salud, whether it's, I'm forgetting the name of that milk company in Austin.

2:13Anyways, a bunch of websites. And, you know, I've been doing this at least on Shopify since 2017. And pre-2017, I used to, you know, have fun and dabble on WordPress and all that thing. So I've seen a lot of websites. I've been involved in designing websites, the wireframing, the copywriting, the UX, thinking through the merchandising journey. And so with all of that knowledge that I have, or at least, you know, claim to have, I want to just go through a handful of websites in today's episode and just talk about what I think is interesting or what I find interesting when I go through these websites themselves.

2:52Now, we will go through some of these in desktop because I think, you know, there's just great modules to take and people still do have desktop traffic, especially if you have different categories of purchase, right? If you're higher end furniture, if you're, you know, over 500 bucks, AOV is a very good chance. These are desktop purchases, maybe even if discovery was on mobile. So I want to go through the full websites today. And then for next week's episode, I want to do the same thing, but I'm going to go through funnels, uh, that, you know, people don't really talk about. We see on direct consumer Twitter or LinkedIn or other podcasts.

3:27There's always these kind of the similar brands that get talked about when it comes to, you know, looking at their Facebook ads. And I was even doing a quick query last night into my own content, seeing is there commonalities in the different brands that I've been talking about over the years? And there totally is. There's somewhat of a bias between brands I've invested or advised or helped launch, but I want to go find, I've already found a couple of these websites that are hidden gems. No one's ever seen them. No one's ever talked about them before they're doing, you know, one to 3 million page views a month, absolutely ripping on affiliate and Facebook traffic.

4:00And I want to break down those funnels and also call out how they're different than the sites we're going to go through today. So without further ado, let's get started. So what I recommend is if you're listening to this, I want you to go ahead and pull up these sites as well on your own. I believe that I can go ahead and... Nope, I don't think I can share my screen into the YouTube, But go ahead. I'm going to narrate everything as I'm going through it so that you can go ahead and just follow along without really any issues. And if you have any questions, please DM me at Mr. Sharma on Twitter.

4:38And I'm happy to answer any questions, whether it's about a specific website we talked about here or if it's you've got a website that you put up, you want some quick feedback. I'm happy to send you a voice note or just a couple of bullet points based on my thoughts. All right. So the first one I want to go through is actually not one because for anything other than one specific module, the company's called Siren. You may have heard about it. It's spelled S-Y-R-N.com. That's S-Y-R-N.com. This is Sydney Sweeney's new lingerie brand. And, you know, whenever I come to these websites, especially like celebrity sites, I tend to find that most are just underwhelming.

5:18They don't really do a good job proactively telling brand story, product story, what makes the product different. This site is honestly, unfortunately, no different than that. For the most part, the homepage is pretty plain and kind of like editorial style. The product pages have really no information. There's only one really good thing about this website, even the cart. If you click open the cart and there's nothing in it, it's just an empty state. And they have a cheeky line of copy, which says no commitments yet. But I mean, what a waste. You've got one of the biggest celebrities in the world.

5:49And yet you've got probably one of the laziest Shopify sites developed. Apologies to whatever agency got paid$180 ,000 to build this website that will probably only convert for huge fans, not necessarily people who don't know the brand or aren't a big Sydney fan. That said, a couple of things I would, okay, let's actually talk about a couple of things I would change. So if you go to the PDP, there's no information, not a single review, not a single testimonial. There's no lifestyle imagery. We know that in apparel, you need to show the product on multiple sizes, body sizes, different colors, different races.

6:29You know, you have to really just show the lifestyle it's in as well, which we'll talk about with a different brand coming up soon. That's something you can can definitely learn from the alcohol industry, all of their commercials, their ads, their content is all kind of portraying the lifestyle that you are buying into as a customer of that brand, because within alcohol, at least all the big brands, you know, the Diageos, the Bacardi's, the Centauri's, and the Pernod Ricards, these massive companies, they have an agreement in place that they will collectively agree to not advertise drinking the liquor because they don't want to do that.

7:06You know, you can't drink the liquor on a moving vehicle. Like if you ever see a Grey Goose commercial on a boat, you'll notice they're never drinking it. They're only portraying that lifestyle. So the boat looks extra nice. The people are dressed extra nice. The water is, you know, beautifully blue, kind of showing that lifestyle. Anyways, that's what you need to do in apparel as well. And this brand, unfortunately, just completely missed the mark on it, which is shocking to me because you've got one of the biggest celebrities in the world. And I mean, whoever built the site, like took their money and ran with it.

7:38But the one thing I will say that these guys do well is, uh, they have this reveal range, um, kind of little module in the PDP. So if you go to any PDP, I believe it's any PDP. I clicked a few and it was all on there underneath the add to bag button. They have this reveal range, um, slider and it goes from fully dressed to a little peak to tease them to strip down to next to nothing. And I just thought that was interesting. It doesn't look like any of this is clickable. You know, if I was designing this, or if I developed this site, those reveal range things I just mentioned, the fully dressed, a little peek, tease them, et cetera, those would all be clickable.

8:16And if you clicked it, you would go to a collections page with all of those products. Now it does look like what they did was they added complimentary products or what they call go all the, well, they just wrote their copies go all the way, but really that's just a section of like recommended products. Again, if I was developing the site, I would make sure that the reveal range chart matched in, in what is shown there. So for example, and they probably, it's probably not because it's done, it's not like a tag or it's not a collection, which is also why there's no collections page when you click it.

8:50But you know, when you click it, when you click one of the recommended products, the reveal range is different. So it just seems like whoever built this site kind of did it last minute. I will also say a lot of celebrity brands, they, you know, like it's a celebrity, it's usually a money person. And then they go find some, somebody who's ran a consumer brand before to just put it all together. So they have no, really no, none of those guys have really done zero to one properly. And that's why you end up with, you know, a site that looks like this, probably an agency that was just chosen because they were cheaper than others or whatever it may be.

9:23But anyways, this reveal range, I like, it reminds me a lot of, uh, back in the DTC 1.0 days when Glossier first, uh, launched their Yotpo reviews widget. Um, they used to have this

9:36Nik:slider where, you know, depending on the, on the person reviewing it, you could mention your age, your skin type, and maybe it was like a skin condition that you were hoping to solve. Basically you could add these kinds of attributes. And, uh, not only did that give Glossier a ton of data, which I don't know if they really did anything with it, unfortunately. But it's nice to see that you can kind of carve out these different things out of products. Okay. So outside of this on Siren, there's really nothing else I would add. So let's move on to the next one. The next one I wanted to show, now I didn't want to just show supplement brands because I know we've talked a lot about supplement brands, mainly because I think health and wellness is an amazing category.

10:17It's grown so much, but I did want to go into some other brands, things like bedding, things like apparel, things like beauty, personal care. Um, uh, and then of course we'll get to some supplements cause like I can't stay away. So, uh, next one I want to go to is parachute home. So pull up parachute home.com just spelled normally parachute home.com. Now parachute, if you've ever been to their stores across the country, you'll know that they're usually in that cluster of stores next to Buck Mason, you know, Sun Life Organics smoothies, maybe a Soho house, you know, maybe Outdoor Voices, like that cluster of DTC one and a half to 2.0 brands, I would say.

10:58And one of the things I think Parachute has done extremely well from the get-go, which is a huge kind of like hat tip to them, is they've done an amazing job with brand.

11:08Nik:And I don't necessarily mean that they're out here running TV campaigns, doing celebrity endorsements, sponsoring events. You know, they're not like building brand in that way. They're not spending ungodly amounts of money on brand initiatives. What I mean is when you go to their website or you walk into their store, you can feel the lifestyle and kind of the vibe of that brand. You feel it into your core in the sense that, you know, you go to this site, for example, there's no question about it. This is a multi-hundred million dollar brand, right? You can feel it when you get there. They've got very distinct fonts.

11:47Nik:They've got distinct placement for different things. You'll notice even their kind of title font is a serif font, but their, you know, smaller fonts are sans serif, which creates a nice contrast and distinction between the two, especially when you go into the navigation, which I think is one of my favorite parts about this site, because you've got that contrast on the right side. When you hover over any of the navigation on the right side, you've got those little cards that take you to collections pages or sometimes other content pages. But you can see that sans serif against the serif contrast.

12:19It looks really nice and just draws your eyes there, really,

12:24Nik:without having to do any sort of work around adding labels or colors. Underneath, actually, like bedding or pillows and duvets or new or bestsellers, you've got different micro categories broken out in there. And this might be based on, you know, types of sheets, layers, fabric, foundations, baby, you know, lounge, decor, material. You've basically got all these things break broken out. And then what's also cool is like, if you go under bedding, for example, under fabric, you'll see the carcale and linen, I might be butchering that word there, but they say popular next to them, right? It draws your eyes there.

13:02Nik:It's not in a way that's too alarming. And then in the bottom left of that same betting nav section, you see the save tab, and then you see sale betting, 15 % off bundles, 15 % off utility bundles. And it's just a very well done navigation. I think that it's really rare that brands actually focus on the navigation. I'm not really sure why. But I think there's always an opportunity to include nice editorial feeling photography, which also I should call out, these guys have phenomenal photography. If you look at the product photography, you can tell they're not renders just by the lighting and how they are done.

13:40Nik:Although I will say for those of you who are using Gemini or any of these other models to generate images or product images or use renders and put it in and tell it to create kind of a lifestyle looking shoot, I bet you could get pretty close to this stuff now. Though again, if you can do these real shoots that, you know, always comes through, I think people's own sense of like a bullshit meter is going to get even stronger as it relates to finding out or deciphering what content was made by AI and what was not. Anyways, back to here, back to the site. So the photography is phenomenal, right? You've got product imagery that looks gorgeous against these white backgrounds.

14:21Nik:If you hover over any of these product cards on the homepage, you see kind of a lifestyle image that sort of portrays it, right? You've got this body pillow cover, for example. And when you hover over it, you can see a girl, you can see her hand, both her hands actually over it. And you see the sheet kind of scrunched up, giving it that real cozy, comfortable, you know, morning coziness, snuggling feeling. Makes a massive difference in conversion rate and especially click-through rate to get to the PDP and for people to discover and kind of learn about the product. When you go down and you see these modules in between, like the archive sale or, you know, the module that says thousands of reviews agree, the differences in the details.

15:00Nik:These are more lifestyle focused images, or even some of these categories select, this category carousel of images about, you know, a little more than halfway down the page. You've got sheets, quilts and comforters, bath, et cetera. These are sick lifestyle images that really elevate the website. And I think the other thing this site does a really good job of is I've talked about the push and pull sections on a website before. In these push and pull sections, I describe it as like you're pushing and you're pulling. Pulling is like you're asking for a CTA or, you know, you're asking the user to do something, the consumer to do something.

15:38I hate saying user. I feel like it's, we're not apps here,

15:41Nik:but you're usually looking for like a click, an add to cart, a purchase, right? Those are the pull modules or the pull sections. And then you have push sections where you're pushing information, education, information, and you're trying to get them to learn or be educated about what it is you're selling, why you are the greatest at it, what makes your materials different, you know, what sets your customer or product experience apart. And I think another one that we should probably add to that list of those five landing page questions is like, why is this legit? And I think that's a little bit different than, you know, why should somebody trust this over another brand?

16:21Nik:But the why is this legit is only going to get more and more and more important, I think, over the next year or two. Definitely a longer period of that, but I think definitely in the next year or two, it's going to be a little hump that brands are going to have to get over as everybody is now getting used to AI slop. Okay, so that was just the homepage. If we go into, oh, another one is the email pop-up. So So their email pop-up, it looks like they use Alia. I think they do. I think we set that up, actually. They try to figure out whether you're going for bedding or bath right away, and that puts you into segmented flows.

16:58Another thing I like is the empty cart state. So if you open the empty cart, you will see it says your cart, zero. Free U.S. shipping at the top, just another reminder there. In the cart says nothing here yet. Life is short. Get the linens. Love that. It's a playful way that life is short, get the linens is push and pull within two sentences as a subheading. Life is short. Yeah, it is. Get the linens. Yeah, shit, you're right. Why shouldn't I? Right? It's an amazing use of, it's like very UX forward, UX friendly copywriting that more websites need to incorporate. and that is the type of stuff that, you know, a great creative will put together.

17:44I remember there was also an amazing line of copy that this woman, Amber, um, who she worked at pointer creative and then worked at Sharma brands. She, uh, wrote this line of copy for Judy, which was a preparedness kit brand that I helped launch in, uh, 2019.

18:04Nik:And it was prepare for what you can't predict. Like what a banger line of copy that is. You can't, you couldn't replicate that with AI. If you tried, you wouldn't be able to get to that with AI. But these lines of copy that you can insert on your site, there's probably 12 to 15 lines that you just need to have. Maybe it's headlines of, of a full page, right? Like if you go to a collections page, maybe it's the heading of a certain module or a section on the actual site. Maybe it's this copy in the cart, maybe it's the copy in the actual checkout if you've got Shopify Plus and you've got your modules there.

18:43But these lines of copy that are basically designed to kind of like put your arm around the consumer's shoulder and show them the way forward to get to checkout, those are some of the most important lines of copy. And then of course underneath this, you've got these four

18:59Nik:modules, shop sheets, shop bedding, shop bath, and shop bestsellers. These are basically taking their top three categories of product. And then if not there, then we're trying to get people to go to bestsellers. Why did we not put mattress there? Or why did we not put, you know, robes there? Well, because, well, actually robes is technically under bath, but why is mattress not there? Well, because it didn't have enough traffic against these four options. And so we decided to go with these four options. Okay. Those were kind of the main things I wanted to show. The other thing I will call out is their product pages.

19:37Nik:So I do really like their product pages. If you have a in-store pickup option for your brand, I think that Parachute does a really good job displaying that. They also have got a nice store locator page where you can click that location icon at the top and it'll take you to a nice little Parachute stores page. But on the PDPs, you can basically check availability at a store. And I assume, I actually don't 100 % know how we're doing this, but I assume we're looking at the IP address of the user incoming to the site, which is just given information, right? If you go to like Google and search, what's my IP address, you don't have to opt in for that website to know your IP address or for Google to know your IP address.

20:23Nik:I think we're doing the same thing here. You can actually take your IP address and you could do this in Google so you can see how this works. Take your IP address, go to Google and search IP address to address converter. You go to that link, you put the IP address in, it'll give you an address. It's probably, it might not be your exact address. You know, if you work in a office building or an apartment building, you might get a slightly broader address, you know, whatever the internet hub is on the ground that's connecting the multiple buildings going into the main line. If you live in a neighborhood, like in the suburbs, You usually have one or two kind of like, you know, internet hubs for your neighborhood.

21:02So it might be a more generalized address, but you're still getting within, you know, a couple of zip codes of standard deviation, a couple of standard deviations of your location. I think that's the right way to say it. I didn't finish calculus. Or you're getting within the city. So it knows where you are.

21:19Nik:So all that to say, this comes back to Parachute's PDP. it tells me pickup available at Soho NYC, usually ready within 24 hours. And I can also check availability at the other stores. When I do that, what's cool is it doesn't just show me, doesn't just give me a, um, a thing to pop up and say, enter your zip code because there's only a handful of stores. There's one, two, three, four, five, six or seven stores. Um, it just tells me right away, Hey, the university village, Seattle, Washington store, it's available. The silver like store in LA, it's available. The Hayes Valley store in San Francisco, it's available.

21:54So I thought that was really cool.