Is it possible to be envious of your own creation?
When your clients tell you how much they adore what you’ve produced as they build your tech into their business, we believe it’s entirely possible - yes!
Envy is one of our premium Shopify themes, and we love it when our merchants tell us all about how much it’s made a positive impact on their profits as well as their customers’ shopping experience. Envy exists to provide the perfect way to promote featured products as well as to showcase offers, sales, and promotional activities (including blogs). It’s no wonder so many brands choose to use it when running a product-based e-commerce business.
James Byrne, CEO at Faerly, has been telling us how he’s more than fairly impressed with the theme’s functionality, style, and ease of integration, after moving from a corporate career to set up shop on his own during lockdown.
“Our checkout completion rate is higher than 64% which demonstrates a smooth, frictionless shopping and checkout experience.”
Faerly is an online store for sustainable living, so if you’ve read about any of our other clients, you’ll know this is right up our street. Faerly hand-pick and retail collections of everyday pieces from independent Irish creators, makers, and eco-conscious retail shakers!
In the fairly early days of Faerly, the brand was created to play a key part in reducing unnecessary chemicals and plastics in the retail sector. Inspired by the Scandinavian concepts of Hygge (no, we can’t pronounce it, either) and Lagom, James wanted to combine those philosophies with his passion to support Irish makers. His thought was that this could work to create an online presence that would inspire healthier and happier lives of contentment, whilst being kind to the environment at the same time. Faerly is a place for the community to share products that contribute to that lifestyle and philosophy. At Faerly, consumers can grab great finds whilst supporting local businesses – without little (if any) negative impact on the environment.
“In making sure this was a good e-commerce business model, I wanted to focus on functionality, support and design”, says James. “We spent a lot of time looking at Shopify themes that would tick as many boxes as possible, given the fact that we didn’t want to be messing around with the integration of too many things, or be tying ourselves up with a developer.”
Those tickbox wishlists are nothing new to us because we build all of our themes with our merchants in mind. It’s always about what they might need and want; not only to make their shopping experience more attractive and conducive but also for what will make their lives easier as online business owners. After all, how can we help serve their customers if we can’t serve our own?
“Top rated for speed and reliability and support were all important factors for us in our search. Having a UK-based support team was a big factor as we’re in the same time zone here in Ireland and the reviews about the responsiveness of the support team were very positive. As a design-based business, we also needed to make sure that the design, look and UX ‘feel’ of the theme would be a real brand booster to draw in and keep our customers”, offered James, when telling us why Envy was the logical choice for Faerly’s e-commerce site.
The great thing about the arena we operate in is that there are lots of other businesses creating great themes for Shopify sites – and whilst that may sound counterintuitive to what we’re trying to do, it’s actually a good thing because it keeps us at the top of our game. James shared with us that we were top of the list for his choice of themes, but that for a while, we shared that top spot with another provider. He even told us that the other theme nearly edged us out thanks to a predictive search function…. that we’ve since gone on to build into Envy anyway!
Even prior to this, though, James was clear that the difference that would always define who would win his business would “all came down to the customer support reviews”.
It always does, James. It always does.
“We’ve recently upgraded to the latest theme version and Shopify 2.0 and the support team could not have been more helpful in making this process as smooth as possible.”
Not that James is big on superstition, but he did reveal that our theme variation names of Copenhagen, Oslo, and Stockholm spoke to him as a good omen, given the fact that Faery is based on those wonderful Scandinavian principles of Hygge and Lagom. Nope, still can’t pronounce them…
“Support was always going to be a big deal for us, but that doesn’t take away from our love of the look and feel of the site. It’s simple and clear, and that’s so attractive to our customers who have told us they find the buying process “seamless”. The design gives product imagery space to breathe and really helps our makers tell their stories of their sustainable brands. What’s more, our conversion rate has been consistently double the Irish average since we launched, and our blogs are in the top 10% of Shopify blogs, which for a new store based in Ireland, is more than Faerly impressive!”
If you envy Faerly’s success in e-commerce… you know what to do! Get in touch.
Good luck to James and the team at Faerly in the Retail Excellence ‘New Online Retailer of the Year’ Awards! Keep following our social media to find out how they get on!