In this episode, we interview Ed Davies, CEO and Co-founder at Wearth London, about why the business chose to partner with 5874 and build on BigCommerce and how they’ve used the platform to drive their growth.
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Green ecommerce is a key trend in 2022 with consumers increasingly savvy about businesses with genuine eco credentials and sustainability claims under close scrutiny. Wearth London has environmental conscience in its DNA and has been scaling quickly using the BigCommerce platform. In this episode you can hear from one of the co-founders about their ecommerce journey and what tools & tech they use to drive ecommerce revenue.
Tl;dr: what we cover:
- Why Wearth chose BigCommerce & 5874 Commerce
- Building a product management systems in-house
- Using SearchSpring to improve product discoverability
Key Discussion Points
What were the key drivers for the replatform and what impact has moving had on your ecom operations?
- We had scaled from £34k in our first year to over £1.5m sales a year within a couple of years and this growth was making life more difficult
- The app ecosystem was the main thing here as we had to create manual integrations for certain software which was expensive and not easy
- For example we’ve just moved order management system for our brands to Duoplane and the BigCommerce integration has made this much more of a seamless process
What advice would you give other teams embarking on a project?
- We spent around 6 weeks doing an intense discovery with our developers to create a clear site architecture to ensure we have the right features and functionality to serve what we’re looking to do. I think this helped the build process as the main decisions were already made.
- Leave a lot more time than you think, our original aim was to launch in August in the slow period but the inevitable delays of building a website meant that we launched in November, uncomfortably close to Christmas but at that stage we had all the ducks in a row so we wanted to go ahead
You selected SearchSpring: why was this tool needed, how do you use it & what impact has it had?
- A key part of our business is to help our customers to shop by certain characteristics to align the shopper’s journey with their values, e.g. living more plastic free or being vegan
- We wanted to have a complete solution across our search, product recommendation and merchandising with an AI driven system to help with this
- Before we were manually choosing which products to rank on category pages whereas Searchspring helps automate this e.g. pushing seasonal products
- As a result we have a more unified experience for our brands and the data behind it
- We are still in the optimisation/learning phase but so far it has saved us time and likely has improved our customer experience
What tool do you use for Loyalty & what impact does it have?
- We use Smile.io; early signs are we are getting decent uptake, in the last 30 days we had around 675 members join the scheme
- We branded our loyalty scheme as the Wearth Circle so I think one advice would be to try and brand the loyalty program and make it have more of a community feel
- Smile told us it’s important to get a reward from purchasing after around 3 purchases
Why did you choose to add Fast payments?
- Fast is a good example of easily being able to add a new feature to the site with moving to BigCommerce
- The more efficient you can make checkout,, the better in terms of conversion rate
- A one click checkout solution on the product page we thought just made a lot of sense and tech which until Fast came along has only really been available for the big players like Amazon
- It has worked great so far and in January represented around 14% of our sales and I think this will likely grow as awareness grows of Fast
- Customers seem to be using it more for one or two product baskets with the AOV £25 vs £35 for the site overall, so it is a great tool for customers who already know what they’re looking for/may have already purchased before and want to stock up
How do you ensure you have genuine eco credentials?
- To make all Wearth orders carbon neutral, where we actually mitigate twice as much carbon as is emitted, we work with Climate Partner, an independent specialist where we send over all the information on orders, delivery distances etc
- They then mitigate the carbon through a range of schemes including forestation projects
- The cost to make a delivery carbon neutral is actually quite low and it is done using the data from the orders as we do not deliver ourselves so there is also no impact to delivery times
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