Fun with: Tumblers (Stanley 1913)
On Monday we crushed the role of VP, Ecommerce at Trupanion.
Now let’s embark on our new role as VP, Ecommerce @ Stanley 1913.[Permalink]
Stanley 1913 is private, but reportedly grew 10x from $70MM in 2019 to 2023 with 750MM in sales, driven by their Adventure Quencher tumbler. In 2024, however, sales slowed from 78% CAGR to 7%. The social + influencer + celebrity mashups that drove hydration growth for 4 years evaporated.
DTC has more levers to pull than any other channel, so let’s make DTC the next 🔥hot🔥 move for Stanley.
🛟First, let’s rescue shoppers stranded in the sea of SKUs. Hitting “Shop” dumps you into 1,424 products with zero curation. Let’s leverage our first party data to inform how shoppers discover and buy, and build those journeys: activity type, product type. cultural icon, etc. And if we don’t have that capability yet - good news, because Stanley is on Shopify and integration with Algolia or Nostro is easy. When we optimized journeys for Surface at Microsoft, we saw immediate and continued 20%+ lift in conversion rates, and our tools were much cruder.
🪖Next, let’s defend the shopper against checkout ambushers. My checkout flow was blockaded by an email capture interstitial. Let’s go for the sale instead. This current checkout prevention widget tells me the checkout flow is not optimized, so we’re going to look at the entire flow. I suspect we’ll find another drop-off point: the heavy-handed treatment given to Shop Pay, Shopify’s native payment method. Shop Pay may be a golden path for Shopify, but it can be a death trap for shoppers lost in it’s confusing maze. We’ll analyze the cart-to-checkout churn points and fix them.
💗Finally, let’s entice shoppers to add more Stanley products to their cart. There was no attach motion in my checkout flow. “Attach” is such a no-brainer here: hydration happens at all day at home, in the car, at work, at the gym, and with such a low price-point, attach doesn’t get any easier than this. The recipe here is: ✅the right recommendation; 💖a compelling offer, ⚙️and low-friction. Here, too the Shopify ecosystem has a myriad of options.
📈We’re not only going to get Stanley back to high double-digit Y/Y growth, but we are going to build a culture of data-driven continuous improvement and wring as much value out of the Shopify ecosystem as we can. These DTC improvements will ensure that Stanley doesn’t cool off any time soon.
