Hey there,

If you ask me, we are now in “Liberty Season.” What is Liberty Season you ask? Well, I’m here to tell ‘ya ….

As I write this — your most favorite-est eCommerce newsletter — it is Juneteenth. Juneteenth is now an official federal holiday in the US and it recognizes the momentous happening of June 19th, 1865, when the last slavery laws were rescinded after the Civil war. Sure, good ‘ol Honest Abe Lincoln has signed the Emancipation Proclamation a few years earlier, but the Confederate states did not abide until after the war was over.

And if you remember, a few weeks ago we had Memorial Day where we remember the fallen soldiers — including those of the Civil War — who, as Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address, “… we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave their last full measure of devotion ….” Good stuff.

Then, a mere two weeks from now we will be celebrating Independence Day on July 4th which marks the day — “fore score and seven years” before Gettysburg — when a bunch of crazy patriots declared their freedom from England by singing the Declaration of Independence … and upon which day each year thereafter the beer doth flow, the barbecue doth smoke, and the rockets doth red glare.

Did you know that the first drafts of the Declaration of Independence were written of paper made of hemp … cannabis … in other words, on processed leaves of marijuana? This will be relevant later on.

Anyway, taken together, these holidays are a 1-2-3 triple-threat trifecta of freedom-loving awesomeness. And there is nothing so freedom-loving as screwing up one’s courage and nurturing one’s own entrepreneurial impulses and starting a small business online. Which a lot of people have done, apparently.

Using my super-secret James-Bond caliber eCommerce spy tools, I found hundreds of sites that are selling Juneteenth-themed merchandise, and 31 that even have “Juneteenth” in their domain name. There is quite a range of them … from a single-product site selling related yard signs to a site specializing in Juneteenth T-shirts. And there are about an equal number of sites flying their colors for Independence Day as well … include dozens of T-shirt sites like this one and such and so-on.

But not wanting to single out any of the Liberty-theme holidays to feature this week, I decided to focus on the word “Liberty” itself. That search yielded 200 Shopify sites … evidently a lot of you folks like your Liberty, and I cant say I blame you.

Anyway … I chose one for this week’s website review. Let’s meet ‘em.

Happy Selling,
Zach

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Shopify Teardown Target of the Week: LibertyClothing.com

So, let’s review that Declaration of Independence stuff ….

Back in the day you couldn’t run out to the local Office Max and buy a pack of laser paper. Everything upon which people wrote — Founding Fathers included — was hand made. Real sheepskin parchment was, and is, expensive. But it lasts a super-long time. You could get a stack of paper made from hemp cellulose much less expensively. So, the first two drafts of the Declaration were written on hemp paper.

Why does this matter? Because the first thing you see when you arrive at LibertyClothing is “The Hemp Collection.” That, the fact that they were founded in 1989 Ontario — before we all became more accepting of hemp products — and that they have a “Peace Sign” as a part of their logo suggested to me that LibertyClothing was founded by a neo-hippie-libertarian for whom “marijuana legalization” was a key political issue. But when I dug in I discovered that Anne Joyce seems perfectly a reasonable serial entrepreneur and interior designer.

The business is still based in Ontario, Canada, and has made several big market pivots over the last thirty years. They started with denim and leather to some success, but then when the recession of 1992 hit, they pivoted to nostalgic Summer-camp wear and made a name for themselves. Then, as the Summer-camp generations faded — because teenagers would rather sit in a beanbag playing WoW and MineCraft for 12 hours a day than canoe and make macaronis picture frames during the Summer these days — they pivoted again to design for cannabis-loving whatever they call themselves customers because I lose track.

Anyway … They have a physical store location in Ontario as well. And I can see that the physical store is also … a distillery. So, I like Anne even more now.

Based on analytics, the online sales are somewhere between $300k and $400k per year and that puts this site as about #115,000 in Shopify-land as ranked by sales. Since Shopify is currently about … what … 6.8 million sites or so, that means they are in the top 2%.

The Shopify Theme That They Use

Here is another reason to like LibertyClothing … even though they are high-faloot’in designer types, they built their website foundation on a solid premium theme and did not think that they had to create a theme from scratch which is a total waste of money most of the time and … well, that’s what we call “Zach’s law.”

The site is built upon the the Masonry them from our friends at Clean Canvas. If you want to see that theme for yourself and fiddle around with the bells and whistles, you can find it on the Shopify theme store.

Stuff They Do Well

I’ve heard that some of you get a little whiney because I talk about page speed a lot. Well … at TaskHusky we fix code. DUH! Bad code not only makes errors and problems, it slows sites down and decreases conversions. We LOVE good code here in the office so we notice this a LOT. Anyway … the LibertyClothing site is a rocket ship. Really great scores on our benchmarks. Grade is an “A” in every category and we do not see that very often.

Um … well, everything else is just solid and “normal.” It’s hard to pick out any additional things to call positive attention too because of the other stuff is just mainline, conventional work. Do not take that the wrong way … that is not a criticism … just nothing more “special” if you know what I mean.

Stuff That Needs Improvement

OK … this is kind of a pet peeve. Take a look at the home page on both laptop and mobile. On normal computers, the hero image is cut off so that you have to scroll to see the Cale-to-Action (CTA). But, it looks OK on mobile phones because the stylish left-side menu shifts up to a “hamburger” stack. BUT … the hero image is also a sliding carousel with three images. The first has a CTA to go to … the “About Us” page? What the heck?! So, hero image are fails on 2 counts.

The categories kinda bother me. If you click on “Shirts,” one might expect a list of all shirts. Seems logical. But no. It only displays plaid button-downs … you know, the kind you wear when you are in a Grunge band from Seattle in 1995.

Do you know ANY man who calls their pants “bottoms?” No. Neither do I. And yet, there is a category called “Bottoms” and mens clothing is on it. Know your audience, my friends.

Zach-o-meter Score

Let’s give it my “meh-est” rating so far with a Zach-o-meter score of 6.0 out of 10.

The Shopify Apps They Use

As usual, we used our super-duper top secret Shopify website analysis tools to peek under the hood and see what apps they are running on the site. Take a look. If you like what you see on their site you may want to look into the apps that they are using too.

• CarCart — Cart abandoment.

• Bugsnag — This is the code cleaning tool of champions these days.

• GTranslate — Language localization.

• Privy — Email marketing.

• JudgeMe — Customer reviews app.

• ShopPay/ApplePay/Amazon Payments — Express payment options.

• Handlebars — Statistics.

• DoubleClick — Ad network.

Hmmmm … this is a pretty light list. Makes me feel like I’m missing something, but OK.

Marketing Stuff That They Do

Instagram … that’s pretty much it as far as social goes. And not very many posts at all … just a few per month. Didn’t even find a Facebook page that one would need to launch Facebook ads on the Devil’s network. Seems like amiss to me.

No … I see “DoubleClick” in the apps section above, but I cannot find any ads actually running right now. I also cannot find any influencer marketing or affiliate marketing or … anything other than a bit of email marketing.

Dang peculiar.

I have no ads to show you at all. So, here’s a picture of a Hip Grunge -Rock Plaid-Wearing Husky Dog who looks like he at one point in time did smoke weed with a band.

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