Skincare Brand Gets Major Black Friday Boost and Adds $700K in Annualized Revenue

Dermaclara is a San Diego, California-based beauty and wellness brand with a holy grail set of products: best-in-class medical-grade silicone patches scientifically proven to reduce the appearance of fine lines, scars, and blemishes. Thanks to the strong storytelling around its products and an impressive influencer network led by founder Ashley King, the brand had captured significant word-of-mouth — but while these two factors could compel new users to visit the Dermaclara website, they weren’t enough to make the sale.
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That’s where we came in, with a series of highly targeted experiments to uncover why buyers weren’t pulling out their credit cards — despite the brand’s success raising awareness of its virtues and backing up its claims with ample scientific evidence.
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Here, we’ll go through the changes we made, which showed results so quickly that they even surprised us — for an annualized revenue increase of $700,000 and a 29% boost in the returning visitor conversion rate.

Challenges

When we began working with them, Dermaclara’s conversion rate was already in the top 10% for Shopify sites — a testament to the success of their products, marketing, and publicity. With coverage from media outlets like Forbes, Martha Stewart, E! News, and The Doctors, brand knowledge among consumers was both high and positive. The brand’s founders had accomplished the hard work of creating a best-in-class product and the equally difficult task of successfully communicating its advantages to a wide audience.
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What we saw, however, was that all of these efforts were let down by the website and the shopping experience.
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Our Ambitions

We knew our job was to better understand the Dermaclara buyer — to better anticipate their needs and to create a website experience that spoke to their pain points. Dermaclara worked from a very specific brief: to create safe skincare and anti-aging products providing results that equalled or exceeded those of more expensive brands. These products responded (especially those with properties intended to treat facial scarring) to deep, human needs: to feel seen and validated, and to “look one’s best” — whatever that might be. As it was, the products cared for Dermaclara’s buyers in beautiful, meaningful ways. We aimed to revamp the website so that it was just as responsive.

A Thorough Revamp

We completed an extensive set of on-site optimizations, including:

A new navigation/mega menu with new category pages for customer self-selection based on Treatment Type and Treatment Area
New “Before & After” Pages
New “Shop by Treatment” Section on Home Page
Smart Search & Filter added to Collections Page
Cleaned up the organization and alignment on mobile for an easier-to-look-at and use Collections page
New Categories added to the Collections page
Replaced patch info with “What’s Included” on the Collections page
Added Product Previews to the Collections Page
New Image carousel images on Product Detail pages with more “Before & After” images, videos, and feature highlights images.
“Shop Pay” button added to product detail pages
Sticky “Add-to-Cart” button on Product Detail Pages
Image thumbnails added on desktop
New cost comparison carousel image

How We Boosted Dermaclara’s Conversion Rate by 10%

We’d found that thanks to its deep media saturation, Dermaclara’s products were familiar to would-be buyers, who knew to come to the Dermaclara website to find skincare patches to meet their needs — primarily for anti-aging properties, but also for stretch marks and scars. Once there, though, it was harder than expected to find what they wanted (as indicated by the relatively high bounce rate). The products were still good enough that the conversion rate placed them so highly relative to other Shopify brands, as we noted above, but we were confident that our changes would meaningfully increase that rate even more so. And indeed: We soon saw that empowered consumers — with help from us on how to navigate their shopping experience — bought more and spent more time on the site than previously.
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In fairly short order, we found that the changes to the home page, the navigation menu/mega menu, and the Collections pages — as well as the addition of the Shop Bay button on the product detail pages — lead to increased visitor engagement, lower bounce rate, and high conversion rates. Why? Visitors could now find exactly what they were looking for, with less confusion and misdirection. They were able to clearly see the products’ results — thanks to the additional and enhanced “Before & After” images. And thanks to improved filters, they were able to more easily and quickly find products that specifically targeted their exact problem areas, including forehead, eyes, neck, chest, and belly.

We found that of the dozen initiatives above, the change to the image carousel on the product detail page had the biggest positive effect on overall revenue. Dermaclara’s brand is built on the “Before & After” potential of its products — transformation is not the ambition but the expectation.
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We found that adding these “Before & After” images gave us additional space to provide visual testimonies to the power of the products, boosting credibility and trust. We also added videos and feature highlight images to these carousels, giving potential buyers all the visual information they needed to make the best decision for their needs. These were supplemented by images displaying extensive cost comparison information, clearly indicating the savings reaped with Dermaclara. These included not just the substantial price differences (showing Dermaclara at around $30 per month and competing treatments as high as $8000+) but also the low number of competitors whose products were “100% Pregnancy and Breastfeeding Safe” — compelling data for women shoppers of all ages, who are more sensitive to and knowledgeable about the presence of undesirable chemicals in their skincare products than ever before.