Vera & Oak
From browsing to buying — how we rebuilt a fashion storefront to convert at 3× the industry average.
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Vera & Oak is a direct-to-consumer women's apparel brand on Shopify Plus with a loyal audience and strong social media presence. Despite steady paid-traffic spend and a growing email list, their storefront was converting at just 1.1% — well below the 2.5–3.5% benchmark for the DTC fashion vertical. Every dollar of ad spend was working harder than it needed to because visitors were abandoning at product pages, stalling at the cart, and bouncing before checkout even loaded. Creative Labs was brought in to diagnose the gap and close it fast.
Key Performance Highlights
3.2× lift in conversion rate
1.1% → 3.6% store-wide CVR
71% faster LCP
3.2s → 0.9s Largest Contentful Paint
$480K additional revenue
Attributed to CVR improvements in 90 days
38% lower cart abandonment
From checkout flow redesign
The Challenge
High Traffic, Low Conversion — A Leaking Revenue Funnel
Vera & Oak was spending $60K per month on paid social and seeing strong click-through rates, but the storefront wasn't keeping pace. A Hotjar session recording audit revealed three critical failure points: product page images were loading sequentially instead of concurrently, causing a blank 3–4 second delay on mobile; the size guide was buried in a modal that triggered full-page scroll-lock; and the checkout page required account creation before purchase — a friction pattern that research shows kills 35% of guest shoppers immediately.
Core Web Vitals scores were in the red across all three metrics (LCP, INP, CLS) on mobile, which was also suppressing organic rankings for branded and category terms the brand had previously ranked for. The combination of poor page performance, UX friction, and a non-optimized checkout flow created a compounding revenue leak that paid traffic alone could not overcome.
Strategic Execution
A Three-Phase Conversion Engineering Program
Performance Audit & Core Web Vitals Remediation
We ran a full Lighthouse CI audit across 40 product pages and the checkout flow, identifying 18 actionable performance issues. Images were migrated to next-gen WebP/AVIF formats and served through Cloudflare's image resizing CDN, cutting median image payload from 2.1MB to 340KB. JavaScript bundles were code-split and third-party scripts were deferred with resource hints. LCP dropped from 3.2s to 0.9s within two weeks — moving the store from 'Poor' to 'Good' on all Core Web Vitals thresholds.
UX Friction Mapping & Hypothesis-Driven A/B Testing
Session recordings revealed that 68% of mobile users never reached the Add to Cart button because the image gallery consumed too much vertical space. We tested a sticky ATC bar with inline size selection — the variant outperformed by 41% on mobile add-to-cart rate at 95% statistical confidence in 14 days. A secondary test replaced the size guide modal with an inline measurement tool, reducing support tickets by 29% and increasing size-selection completions by 22%.
Checkout Flow Redesign & Guest Checkout Activation
Account creation was mandatory — a legacy setting from the brand's early subscription model. Enabling guest checkout and adding Shop Pay and Apple Pay as primary CTAs immediately reduced checkout abandonment. We A/B tested a one-page checkout summary using Shopify's extensibility APIs against the default three-step flow. The one-page variant reduced time-to-purchase by 34% and lifted completed checkouts by 19%.
Ongoing CRO Cadence & Reporting Dashboard
We established a weekly experimentation cadence: one live test at all times, rotating through product page layouts, trust signals, upsell placement, and urgency messaging. A GA4 + Looker Studio dashboard gave the internal team real-time visibility into CVR by channel, device, and cohort. By week 12 the store had run 9 A/B tests with 7 winners, accumulating the 3.2× conversion improvement.
The Outcome
A Self-Sustaining Conversion Engine That Pays for Itself Every Month
In 90 days Vera & Oak's store-wide conversion rate moved from 1.1% to 3.6% — a 3.2× improvement that turned existing paid traffic into $480K of additional revenue without increasing ad spend. Page load time on mobile dropped 71%, pushing Core Web Vitals scores into the 'Good' range and recovering organic keyword positions lost to performance penalties.
Cart abandonment fell 38% through checkout restructuring, and the brand's cost-per-acquisition dropped 54% as the same ad budget now drove proportionally more purchases. The CRO program delivered a 7.4× return on its engagement fee within the first quarter.
“We'd been told our conversion rate was 'normal for fashion' for two years. Creative Labs showed us that was simply wrong — and then they fixed it in three months. The numbers don't lie: our best revenue quarter ever happened while our ad spend stayed flat.”
Sofia Delacroix
Head of eCommerce, Vera & Oak
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