01
Who they are
12PM Studios is a lifestyle brand that starts with eyewear. It was founded by Jenee Naylor and Joshua Prieto, a husband-and-wife team with a background in fashion and photography.
The name comes from midday light, when the sun is at its highest and everything looks clear. Their frames are named after cities, including Toronto, Milan, Monaco, Copenhagen, and London, and are photographed like a magazine shoot instead of a product catalog. They sell online through Shopify.
Visit 12pmstudios.com
02
The issue
The store ran on a standard Shopify theme, which is a ready-made template. That template was not built for the brand's photography. It cropped faces out of the large banner images, and the layouts fell apart on phones, which is where most of their visitors were.
The founders also wanted features the template did not have: a way for shoppers to save frames for later, color options shown on collection pages, a free shipping progress bar, a free gift with certain purchases, and early access to new releases.
The usual way to add features like these is to install paid apps. Each app comes with a subscription and adds extra code that can slow the store down.
03
How we resolved it
We redesigned the store and then stayed on as an ongoing partner. Over about seven months, we made 266 separate code changes to the theme.
On the design side, we gave the team control over which part of each photo stays in view, so faces are never cropped or covered by text. We also rebuilt the layouts with phones in mind first.
On the feature side, we wrote each feature directly into the theme instead of installing apps. The brand owns the code and rents nothing to run it.
- A wishlistShoppers can save products without creating an account. The team can see which products get saved but not bought.
- A free shipping barShows shoppers how close they are to free shipping. It only appears in the markets where the offer applies.
- A free gift with purchaseThe gift is added to the cart automatically when an order qualifies and removed if it stops qualifying. It starts and ends on a schedule, and the price is checked on the server, so it cannot be changed in the browser.
- Color swatchesEvery color of a frame shows on the collection page, including which ones are sold out.
- Early accessCustomers with a private link can buy new releases before the public.
- Market-aware linksShoppers in each region are sent to the version of a product they can actually buy.
- TrackingWishlist and cart actions are recorded in analytics, so the team can measure what is working.
We measured one feature closely. In the 60 days after the free shipping bar launched, orders rose 9.9% and revenue rose 6.2% compared with the 60 days before. Average order value fell 1.8%.
This is a before-and-after comparison on a live store, not a controlled test. The two periods fall in different parts of the calendar, other work shipped at the same time, and marketing activity varied.
