Furbish Studio partnered with Pacific IQ to improve its website conversion rate by 2.5x, resulting in 49% more sales.
Home Goods
Furbish Studio partnered with Pacific IQ to improve its website conversion rate by 2.5x, resulting in 49% more sales.
Furbish Studio is a home goods brand known for mixing and matching bold patterns and prints to break conventional norms. For its Founder, Jamie Meares, Furbish Studio began as a way to monetize the audience she had built through her blog after being featured in a New York Times article about bloggers to watch.
“I started to think about how I could monetize this following I had built. So I opened Furbish Studio’s first brick and mortar store in Rowley, North Carolina. Then in 2010, I decided to take the business online. Since then, we’ve grown steadily each year. Now, we manufacture our own line of home furnishing products and sell them across the United States.”
While Furbish Studio’s website was functional, it wasn’t converting traffic into sales as efficiently as it needed to. “We found that when we ran paid ads, we would only convert approximately 1% of sessions into sales,” explains Jeff Hutto, Furbish Studio’s Chief Operating Officer.
Leading into the holidays—the most critical sales period of their year —Jamie and Jeff enlisted the help of Pacific IQ to improve its website conversion rates and grow ecommerce revenue. Since then, Furbish Studio has enjoyed a record-breaking 2022 holiday season:
Heading into Q4, 2022, Jeff and Jamie observed that Furbish Studio’s online conversion rates were below industry benchmarks. “Our website was only converting about 1% of our traffic into sales. The industry standard is higher than that, and we knew we could do better,” Jeff explains.
Jeff, however, was weary of the DIY approach based on past experiences. “We’ve tried doing this kind of stuff ourselves before and will never do that again. It wasn’t our core competency and the more time we spent in the weeds, that took our focus away from running the business.”
“A lot of entrepreneurs think they can do it themselves, but what I found is that, as a business owner, writing code and implementing technical stuff isn’t where I need to be spending my time. It’s best to hire an expert with experience to handle that stuff.”
With the busy season fast approaching, Jeff and Jamie sought the help of Pacific IQ to improve its website conversions and help lift its holiday sales. “We set a goal to double our conversion rates knowing that would essentially double our sales,” Jeff explains.
“We needed a partner to ensure our website was converting traffic into sales more efficiently for the holidays. In three months, we needed the technical implementation to be done and ready to perform.”
- Jeff Hutto, Chief Operating Officer, Furbish Studio
Jamie and Jeff had a clear vision for Furbish Studio’s aesthetic, and enlisted Pacific IQ to implement ecommerce best practices, make it easier for shoppers to find what they’re looking for and complete a purchase. “Sean and the Pacific IQ team took the time to understand who our customers were and performed a website analysis to compare our site to competitors in our vertical,” Jeff explains.
“Following the analysis, Sean recommended things we could add to our home page, how to improve our website navigation and page load speed, and how to leverage positive reviews to build trust with shoppers who may not be familiar with the brand.”
For Sean, the path to improving Furbish Studios’ website conversion rates was clear. “Our goal was to first give shoppers confidence in the brand, then make it easy for them to find products they’re interested in and complete a purchase in the fewest clicks possible.”
Throughout the planning process, Jeff and Jamie appreciated Pacific IQ’s collaborative approach. “Sean and the team were really good about giving us creative control over the website's look and feel within the performance guardrails they set up,” Jeff explains. “In doing that, I think we reached a really nice place where our website is higher converting while still staying true to the brand identity we’ve created over the years. It was a great collaborative way of working.”
Jeff and Jamie also appreciated Sean’s hands-on approach. “When our website launched, Sean was right there with us. We felt like he was on the team even though we were like 17 hours apart with time zones. He was responsive, committed to doing things right, and was really invested in ensuring everything went according to plan. Even 4 months post-launch, if we have a question, we get answers almost immediately.”
“Pacific IQ was great at finding a balance in making our website more performant while staying true to our brand. They were mindful to communicate the changes they wanted to make to improve the website’s performance, and attentive to how we wanted the website aesthetic to look.”
- Jeff Hutto, Chief Operating Officer, Furbish Studio
With just 3 months to conceptualize and implement changes to Furbish Studio’s website before the holiday season began, Pacific IQ got the job done. “Our site load speed is way faster, our navigation is more intuitive, our checkout is more streamlined, and we even let customers pay for orders in installments—all of those things made it easier and faster for customers to buy than ever before,” Jeff explains.
While digital ads used to be a source of frustration, Furbish Studios’ new and improved website gave Jeff the confidence to turn ad spend back on to capture more Q4 sales. “One of the things that made us really want to improve our website conversions was that we were spending a bunch of money on ads that weren’t translating into as much sales as we’d hoped,” he explains.
“Once our new website launched, we started increasing our ad spend again. Backed by more efficient ads and a higher average conversion rate, Furbish Studio had its best Q4 to date.”
How much better were Furbish Studios holiday sales? Year over year, the brand’s online sales were 49% better, while its average order value (AOV) increased by 21%. “I attribute a lot of our holiday ad campaign’s success to our website, which is better at turning the traffic our ads produce into sales.”
“What we invested into enlisting the help of Pacific IQ paid for itself after Q4, 2022, just 3 months after the website went live. I’d definitely say partnering with Pacific IQ was a worthwhile investment.”
With a website that has proven to convert more browsers into buyers, Jamie and Jeff can focus their attention on growing the brand. “Our short-term focus is to continue growing revenue in the United States. We’re really concentrating on the West and East coast, and the Southeastern regions. Those geos drive a lot of traffic to our site.”
Following its expansion across the United States, Jeff plans to take Furbish Studios international. “Once we feel like we have a stronger presence in the US, we’ll look to expand into Australia, the UK, and Canada. We’ve seen signals in our website traffic data that suggest we have interested buyers in those markets, which is why we’re keen to eventually start fulfilling orders in those regions and marketing to build brand awareness.”
“We’re on pace to double our revenue this year. The success we’re having with our more performant website will help us continue to fuel Furbish Studio’s growth as we expand into new markets first in the United States and eventually internationally.”
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