CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2115

Laugh Now Cry later with Drake’s OVO on Shopify

April 20, 2021

Hello - 

Now if it seems that I am focusing on celebrity Shopify sites in a shallow attempt to benefit from their popularity and get attention for my weekly email … you can’t prove it. Sure, we did Adele last week and lady Gaga the week before that, but that’s all just coincidence.

And besides, why would want to be all mean and point out such a thing, even if it were true ... which it’s not … but it would be totally fair game if it were true because there’s nothing wrong with it.

Well, it kinda sorta looks that way, but honest … there’s another reason.

In this case, it lets us talk about the power of “brand” and knowing your audience.

Let’s talk about Drake’s merch website in this week’s Shopify teardown.

Happy Selling,

Zachary

Hold Up One Second.Before we get to talking about Drake's Shopify store, I have an important request.This is a chance to get some free promo for your Shopify site AND do some good in the world at the same time. We talked about this last week and a bunch of your replied already (THANKS!), but we could use a few more.This year's charity golf outing is in memory of Stephen — our friend and my golf partner Stephen struggled with depression. We're raising funds at a charity event and auction to support organizations that help people make it through their struggles. TaskHusky has already committed a $1,000 donation to this year's event.We are looking for merchants who can provide an item for our silent auction. In exchange for your gift you'll receive: Mention of your store in an upcoming edition of your favorite newsletter (this one). Your logo included on a hole sponsor sign paid for by TaskHusky. Inclusion in a thank you blog post with a hotlink back to your store.Just hit REPLY to this newsletter and tell me you're in. Thanks.

This Week’s Target: OctobersVeryOwn (OVO)

Company Profile

Drake is a HipHop’in money-making machine. The multi-platinum artist is one of the highest-grossing music artists of the last 15 years. He is also a writer, producer, television star, and entrepreneur with multiple businesses. Drake IS the brand. OVO Sound is his music production company and OctobersVerOwn.com is his online store. He also has a dedicated line of shoes and clothing with several industry biggies, including Nike. He even has his own shoes — Air Jordan OVO.

Folks are selling OVO merch on Amazon, but it looks like cheap Chinese knock-offs that Amazon is supposed to be cracking down on and I’m certain that they’ll get around to when donkeys fly.

But the company has a large social media presence across a bunch of platforms — including a few surprising ones like Tumblr. Perhaps they know something about their customer base that we mere humans do not.

The Shopify Theme They Use

OctobersVeryOwn.com uses a custom theme. And while I make fun of that … a LOT, this time it’s called for. In this case, because the designers at team Drake know that if you are over the age of, oh, let’s say 30 you are NOT the target customer here. Note that I didn’t say not A customer. I said not the TARGET customer.

This site is built for one thing and one thing only … to look great and hip on an iPhone. This site looks pretty lame on desktops. And where most “normal” eCommerce sites get somewhere between 60% and 70% of their traffic on mobile, they also usually have a higher conversion percentage on desktops because people discover on mobile and buy on pc. But the Drake boys at OVO know that their audience lives and breathes on their phones … heck, most of them don’t even know what it’s like to have to do your online shopping on your office pc because you don’t have enough bandwidth at home to download that Wonder Woman screen-saver app. 

But maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, the point is that this theme is custom-made to optimize for a target audience. I get it. And it also helps when you have enough branding power to drive traffic no matter how your website looks.

The Good Stuff

The OVO website is a study in super-fine micro-targeting. This will not work for everyone, but they know what they are doing. Everything is minimalist. Even the font is very small … on purpose. 

Quick science tip: If you want anyone over the age of 40 to buy things on your site, you better not have a font smaller than 12pt. This isn’t a dig, it’s communication science. If your entire target audience is hanging out in a dorm room or cruising the club scene you can use a font that will fit on a microchip and those whipper-snapper kids will still be able to read it.

Get Off My Lawn!

Anyway … The photography is also minimalist and even avoids human models in most cases. Why? Again, it’s science. The focus is on the brand and celebrity (see the marketing section below). If you do not have that kind of power you have to use lifestyle images and actual real people to get folks to look.

The website is FAST (enough). I ran the site through three testing services — including the Google Page Insights tool — and it scores well. Again, mobile devices HAVE to load fast.

Needs Improvement

There is not a lot to criticize here. This is some high-level sophisticated marketing strategy.

If you are a regular reader, you know how I criticize Shopify stores for not using all the major Express Payments options on their sites. Let me be clear, 

you should do that

. But you may notice that Drake’s OVO only has ApplePay (seen in a teeny-tiny little small micro-icon). So, why am I giving Drake a pass on it? Because Apple paid him $19 million cash to partner with merchandising rights, a custom Apple iPhone-only shopping app, and first dibs on Express Payments. If a company will pay you that kind of cha-ching, then you get a pass too. Drake gets it because his fan-base will pay with whatever he tells them to.

Apps They Deploy

We ran a scan to see what Shopify apps & supporting services they are deploying. Get a load of this list:

  • ApplePay — Express payment option.

  • Google No Translate — This is super-interesting. It is a widget that actually prevents Google from translating websites. 

  • Signifyd — Fraud prevention.

  • Klaviyo — Customer lifecycle management.

This may not be a complete list, but this site has no extra tracking, no retargeting, no nothing. Just like last week, there are a few services running to help developers out, but basically, there’s nothing much to see here. But they might have a few custom-made integrations that the scanning tools are not tuned to pick up. 

But this remarkably low app count is one of the reasons the site loads so quickly.

Marketing Stuff They Do

This is interesting … OVO has run ads in the past and they may run ads again in the future. But this brand-ish of brand of celebrity fame relies most on other famous people with social media followings. Rather than paying Mark Zucker-butt or filing the coffers is Google’s Dark Tower they cut endorsement deals with other celebrities — from athletes to movie stars to musicians and models. 

.

But we’ve found recent endorsements by new and old famous folks like fellow Canadians Donovan Bailey, Ross Rebagliati, Ross Rebagliati, and Wayne Gretzky and fellow musicians Offset Jim, OhGeesy, and many more.

They wear the close and post to social media, they get a cut. The only folks upset are the masters of the world in silicon valley. And as you can see from the example above, the announcement gets the lapdog press to write about it, generating millions in publicity value in the process. Sweet deal if you can get it.

Sponsored

Time to make your Shopify website sing. If you need help making Shopify website tweaks or fixing those little nagging things on your Shopify store, let’s get stuff done. 

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