Shop 2.0 Launch | Silk Crystal

Silk Crystal came to us with a strong brand, but no real online presence. Their business was ready to outgrow their bricks-and-mortar shop – they just needed help creating the perfect store that showed off their work while keeping true to their values and aesthetic. So we built them an attractive and professional store using Shopify’s Shop 2.0 – leaving them with a powerful new sales platform, which would allow their business to grow to the next level.

The Client: Silk Crystal

Silk Crystal is a small team of passionate creatives who practise the classic time-honoured art of screen printing.

Based in North Devon, Silk Crystal is a small team of passionate creatives who practise the classic time-honoured art of screen printing. They produce merchandise like T-shirts, hoodies and stickers, decorated with original designs and contemporary street art vibes, reflecting the team’s passion for outdoor pursuits such as surfing and skating. All printing is done in-house, and with a genuine commitment to sustainability – to create iconic, earth-conscious clothing that’s guaranteed to stand out from the crowd.

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The Challenge: Reinvent Silk Crystal’s Online Presence

“Kind of.” That’s how Silk Crystal would reply, when clients asked if they had a website.

Silk Crystal’s brick-and-mortar store in North Devon is popular and well-established, but it wasn’t giving the brand the reach it needed to really grow – and while they had a home-made Shopify store for the business, none of them had the skills or experience to realise exactly what they were looking for. The end result was a basic and uninspired store, which none of the team were particularly proud to promote. 

The challenge for Inspira was to give this fast-growing local brand the web presence that it deserved – with the design and launch of a dedicated and professional Silk Crystal platform that took advantage of all the benefits Shopify can offer.

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The Solution: A Dynamic Online Store Making Use of Shopify’s Industry-Leading Toolkit

The objective of this project was to make sure Silk Crystal were making the best use of the powerful feature set provided by Shopify.

Every job Inspira takes on begins with a brainstorming workshop – we meet with the client, discussing their business and their future plans at length, in order to understand exactly what they need from their web presence. 

In this case, we found there were tons of powerful Shopify features that we’d be able to implement – to help Silk Crystal boost their business and reach more customers online.

Together we were able to identify the following benefits that we could deliver for Silk Crystal using our Shopify know-how:

• A sleek, eye-catching storefront. The team at Silk Crystal is made up of artists, and so we knew that their website had to look fantastic. This was a fun challenge for our creative team! We used a modern Shop 2.0 theme as the starting point, before customising and transforming this into something that uniquely represented the Silk Crystal aesthetic and values.
• Streamlined structure with high product visibility. In practical terms, we wanted to make the site structure as logical and visitor-friendly as possible. So we established a powerful navigation system as our foundation, using Shopify’s mega menus. Then we built on this with enticing CTAs and cross-sell tools, as well as adding convenient search functionality and filters – powered by Shopify's native Search & Discovery app.
• Shipping upsells. In addition to our product recommendations and CTAs, we also added further incentives in the form of free shipping offers on orders in excess of £50. It all helps to drive up that average order value!
• Rich product data. We always stress the importance of product data – keeping your data in order is essential to both the customer, and also to back-of-house and supply chain operations. For Silk Crystal, we designed a system of accordion blocks that would allow the merchant to split and clearly present useful product information in an accessible and easy-to-digest format for their customers.

Custom Collection Pages. Using the powerful features of Shopify 2.0, we decided to create special pages promoting specific collections on the Silk Crystal store. Because if customers love one particular design, then it makes sense to show them the whole range! For example, check out what we did with their ‘Chillin Cat’ collection.

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The Result: A Powerful Online Store… With Room to Grow

We were really happy with the results we were able to achieve for Silk Crystal – and the client was delighted. Finally, they had a store they could shout about!

The new Silk Crystal store launched on schedule, and just in time to promote their new product range. And it works like a dream.

We always look long-term though, when we’re building a Shopify store for our clients. It’s not just about what they can sell today… The perfect online presence should be a tool that enables and stimulates future business growth too. To that end, we also identified a number of further growth opportunities for Silk Crystal, including:

• Alvio integration. Our partners at Alvio offer a powerful collaborative ecommerce platform, and an Alvio integration would allow Silk Crystal to quickly and easily scale up their offerings (for example, by bringing in complementary products such as sunglasses). The same integration system would allow Silk Crystal to sell their products through all their partner’s stores too, to reach whole new audiences.
• Shopify promotions. Shopify features a powerful and intelligent discount system, designed to help merchants move the most possible stock. Features such as automatic discounts and multi-buy offers have been shown to boost average order values, while building a loyal customer base in the process.

We are proud to have created this powerful tool for Silk Crystal, and we’re excited to see what they do with it! 

And remember – for all your Shopify needs, talk to Inspira. As one of the leading Shopify agencies, we’ve helped countless clients to realise and launch their perfect online sales platforms, and we’d love to do the same for you.