CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2231

Getting Totally Hip with Caesar … on Shopify

Yo - 

The rabbit holes I go down while researching for this Shopify newsletter. 

We know that “oct-” means 8, right? That’s why “octopus” has 8 legs … or arms … or tentacles … or whatever. We also know that “dec-” means 10. Like a “decade” is ten years. So, if oct means 8 and dec means 10, why is October the 10

 month and December the 12

?

Turns out that calendars were a huge mess back in the day. Most ancient civilizations marked the calendars by lunar cycles – from full moon to new and then back again. But the lunar cycles do not divide evenly into a solar year, so the calendar wabbled. April would be in the Springtime like it is now, then a few years later it would be in the Summer and so on so everyone was confused. The Egyptians used a solar year calendar and it worked better. So, more than 2000 years ago Julius Caesar figured out that 4 seasons divided neatly into 12, so he took the year from Egypt and carved it into 12 relatively equal chunks – naming one of those chunks after himself (July = Julius). 

Then Augustus Caesar came along a few Caesars later and he did some cool stuff in the month of Sextilis, so they renamed Sextilis to “August” in his honor.

Sextilis … sometimes the jokes write themselves. Naw … that’s too easy and this is a family-friendly newsletter. Let’s just say that renaming Sextilis was probably a good idea. Who knows what kinds of crazy holidays we'd have had that month, am I right people?

Anyway … that’s why the calendar we use today is called the Julian calendar. But no one ever got around to renaming September, October, November, or December so those months now remain firmly planted in irony forever.

Speaking of irony … have you ever been to Madison, Wisconsin? Me neither. But it’s hard for me to imagine that this quaint midwestern town is a hotbed of hip street fashion for the “live in yo’Momma’s basement” crowd. And what do they have to do with August, anyway? Let’s find out.

Think they’ll name a month after me someday? “Zachember” has a nice ring to it. Can you buy a month?

Happy Selling,

Zach

If you have a Shopify site and want that site to be front and center in an upcoming TaskHusky Checkout Weekly newsletter ... this is kind of cool. But keep in mind that I tell marginally humorous jokes and poke fun at everything. So, well, you get the idea.

Just reply to this email and say 

“Tear me down Zach!”

 and I’ll put you on the list for an upcoming issue.

This Week’s Shopify Teardown Target: August-shop.com

The city of Madison is about 80 miles West of Milwaukee, has about 250,000 residents, and one hip-kids fashion store in the old downtown area on State Street. August is a boutique storefront … an actual physical store founded by 

 in 2017. Rob had a decade-long career in selling and marketing for fashion brands when he decided to move back to his hometown and opened-up shop, literally. 

He launched his Shopify store the following year and has been growing his online brand ever since. And he is doing well … our analysis tools estimate that the store is doing an average of $150k per month, with means about $1.8 million per year is retail sales. This puts August in the top 5% of Shopify stores by volume and the top 250,000 of all US based websites. Those are some decent numbers.

The Shopify Theme That They Use

Rob is smart … he is not wasting money on a full custom theme. Instead, they are using a heavily modified version of s solid premium theme. In this case, the Pipeline theme from developers Groupthought. This theme comes in 3 variants, but they have done enough customizations that we can’t see which one they started with.

You can take a 

.

What They Do Well

This is one of those times where I have to be really self-aware and thoughtful. 

I know what you’re asking yourself … you’re wondering why I would all of a sudden be self-aware and thoughtful now after all these years? 

Well, I need to remember that I am NOT the target market for this website. It does not appeal to me at all. But that’s the point. It’s not supposed to. But I can see where it is VERY appealing to crazy kids spending their ‘rents money. That means over-exposed photography, punk-butt kids staring into the camera like they actually have game or something … you get the idea. But I’m telling you that it fits their audience.

Here’s another good thing … it looks a lot better on mobile than it does on a laptop. And that is on purpose too. Where most folks my age … or likely your age too … search on mobile and buy on laptops, the kids shopping on this site are dang near 100% mobile consumers and will be until they get real jobs and want to sponge off the office internet as adults. I know that this doesn’t sound like a compliment, but it really is.

Let me give you another really interesting thing … if you scroll down the home page you will see a section called “Mixtapes.” Even though these are on the home page, they are not products for sale. They are exactly what you think they are … links to music mixes that you can just click on and listen to through a few different streaming services. They get cool kids to create the mix (brand engagement) and then let the semi-cool kids engage with the bool kids and the brand by streaming the tunes. I’m not sure the ROI on this, but it’s an interesting idea I am going to be thinking about.

What Needs to Be Improved

Again ... I need to be a little careful here. For example … some of the text animations make the page load all jerky and screw up the Google scores. But it is not overboard and the kids probably like it. There is some buggy code that should be cleaned up, however.

The Shopify Apps They Use

We used our top-secret Shopify scanning tools to determine that this site is using the following apps and plugins:

  • Carro — eCommerce marketing platform.

  • Klaviyo — Customer lifecycle management.

  • Shopify Inbox — Shopify live chat.

  • PayPal/ShopifyPay — Express payment options.

  • Sezzle — Installment payments (bet you this works well for them).

  • Doubleclick — Ad network.

Note the exceptionally small list of apps. This is the smallest number I have seen in maybe forever.

Marketing Stuff They Do

I found one series of paid search ads. It is SUPER-niche product called “Online Ceramics” that has to do with a punk rock style of clothing that they carry. This search ad is likely profitable because it is so niche that click costs are very low. You can see that ad below and 

. 

They obviously do social media … because they are the cool kids. The have pages on 

, 

, 

, and 

 for video. The Vimeo is a bit of a waste, Twitter has a low follower count, but Instagram is building up OK for a smaller brand. They are not running a lot of social ads. In fact, I can see only 4 this year with only one running now … you can see that one below.

They also do event-based marketing. They host art shows, poetry readings, and music. You can 

. Madison is a college town, so I bet they get some traffic as a result. But all-in-all, there is not a lot of marketing going on that we can see digitally. It would be interesting to dig into their business in the real world.

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