Verdant Outdoor Gear

The challenge

Before

Verdant Outdoor Gear had built a healthy Shopify store over six years and was running at roughly $8M ARR — but growth had plateaued. Traffic was flat, average order value had stalled, and the previous agency had left them with paid ads carrying about 70% of revenue. Every dip in ad spend translated immediately into a revenue dip. The founders wanted a real organic growth and retention engine, not another performance marketing retainer.

• Paid ads driving ~70% of revenue — every spend pullback hit revenue directly
• Organic traffic plateaued for over 12 months with no clear path forward
• Collection pages had thin content, no schema, and inconsistent internal linking
• Product detail pages lacked structured data — losing rich result eligibility
• No personalization on PLPs or PDPs — every visitor saw the same merchandising
• Email capture popup had a static offer with no testing program behind it
• AOV had been flat for 4 quarters despite catalog expansion
• No cross-sell or related-product logic beyond Shopify default recommendations

The solution

What we built

We ran a 6-month Product Growth engagement focused on building an organic and retention engine the brand would own outright. We started with a full technical SEO overhaul — fixing crawl issues, restructuring collection pages into proper category hubs, and rolling out schema markup on every product detail page. In parallel, we built a hybrid AI product recommendation engine that layered collaborative filtering signals over content-based matching, plugged into the existing Shopify storefront. We then set up a continuous A/B testing program against the email capture popup, iterating on offer, framing, and trigger conditions. Finally, we tuned PLP performance — image delivery, layout shift, and time-to-interactive — so the organic gains compounded instead of leaking out at the page level.

How the system flows

1. SEO Audit→Crawl Fix→Information Architecture→Collection Page Rebuild
2. Product Data→Schema Markup→Rich Result Validation→Search Console Monitoring
3. Recommendation Engine: User Signals→Collaborative Filtering→Content-Based Match→Hybrid Score→PDP/PLP Slot
4. Email Capture A/B Test→Variant Ship→Significance Check→Winner Promotion
5. PLP Performance Audit→Image Pipeline→Lazy Hydration→Core Web Vitals Review
6. Weekly Growth Review→Organic Traffic Cohort→AOV Trend→Revenue Mix Dashboard