Client Overview

Purdy & Figg is a Shopify brand that has already done the hard part on the marketing side. Paid and organic traffic were growing steadily, month over month, and demand for the product was real. The gap was on the storefront: a paid, off-the-shelf Shopify theme that wasn’t built around their catalog or their buyers, paired with an analytics setup that couldn’t reliably tell the team where visitors were dropping off.

What began as a foundational rebuild grew into a long-term partnership. Valar Ecom has worked with Purdy & Figg on an ongoing basis since 2019, moving from an initial custom theme build into a structured, always-on CRO program that continues to run today.

The Problem

The store was running on a paid, off-the-shelf Shopify theme, the same starting point available to thousands of other stores on the platform. It looked fine on the surface. Underneath, it carried the baggage every generic theme carries by default:

• Features nobody used, shipping as dead weight on every page load.
• Third-party app scripts are stacked on top of each other, each one slowing the page down a little more.
• A page structure built to sell a catalog in general, rather than built around this catalog, these products, and these buyers.

Worse, Purdy & Figg’s analytics setup couldn’t reliably tell them where the leak was happening. Bounce rates on product pages were high. Checkout drop-off was steep. But without clean measurement, every fix was a guess.

Here’s the part that trips up a lot of growing brands: no amount of on-page tweaking was going to fix a foundation problem. You can rewrite headlines, swap product photos, and A/B test button colors all day. If the underlying theme is bloated and slow, you’re optimizing on top of a leak instead of sealing it. A quick redesign would have been the fast answer. It also would have been the wrong one.

The Solution

The fix had two parts, run in sequence rather than at the same time. Rebuild the foundation first, then build a disciplined, always-on testing program on top of it.

1. Rebuild the foundation first

Rather than patching an already-strained theme with more apps and more overrides, which is how most stores end up even more bloated than when they started, we made a deliberate call to start from the ground up.

A full custom build

We didn’t start by editing the existing paid theme. We started by auditing it, line by line, to understand exactly what was slowing the store down and where the structure was working against the catalog rather than for it. From there, we designed and built a bespoke Shopify theme engineered specifically around Purdy & Figg’s products, content, and the way their actual customers shop.

Performance engineered from day one

Asset loading, script weight, and template structure were requirements from the very first line of code, not a cleanup pass tacked onto the end of the project. The result was a theme measurably faster than the paid template it replaced. Speed isn’t a nice-to-have for conversion. It’s the floor everything else stands on.

CRO sequenced after launch

This is a detail a lot of agencies get wrong. They start testing while the foundation is still shifting underneath them, which makes every result unreliable. We deliberately held off on structured testing until the new theme was stable and live in production, so every result that came afterward reflected the new foundation rather than a moving target.

2. Build an always-on CRO program

Once the new theme was stable, we shifted into what became an ongoing CRO program. Most stores treat conversion optimization as a sprint: a redesign, a handful of A/B tests, then back to business as usual. We built Purdy & Figg’s program to run indefinitely, on a weekly cadence, governed by real statistical thresholds rather than gut feel.

Fixed the measurement layer first

Before running a single test, we rebuilt the analytics and event-tracking layer so every future test had a reliable source of truth. There’s no point optimizing conversion on top of broken analytics. You’re just guessing with better fonts.

Diagnosed the funnel with heatmaps, session replays, and cohort analysis

We didn’t just look at where volume dropped off; anyone can see that in a funnel report. We isolated the specific steps where high-intent traffic, the visitors most likely to buy, were dropping off. That’s a far more valuable signal.

Ran a structured, prioritized test backlog

Every test idea was scored using ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease), so the team always worked on the highest-leverage tests first. Tests ran until they reached statistical significance rather than a fixed deadline.

Treated every test as a hypothesis, win or lose

Winning tests are shipped straight to production. Losing tests were documented just as carefully, so the team never relearned the same lesson twice. Over time, this became a genuine knowledge base of what Purdy & Figg’s specific customers respond to.

The Tests That Moved the Needle Most

1. Reordering how the product page told its story 

The single biggest lift of the entire program came from changing the sequence buyers moved through on the page. Answering the buyer's questions in the order they actually ask them, instead of the order marketing wanted to tell the story, was the highest-leverage change we made.

2. A persistent path to purchase on mobile 

The largest single mobile-conversion win came from making it easier for mobile shoppers to act the moment they were ready, without losing their place on the page. 

3. Reducing friction at the moment of highest hesitation 

We identified the exact point in the purchase flow where hesitation spiked and reduced what stood between the buyer and completing the purchase there. 

4. Rethinking where upsells belong in the journey 

Repositioning post-purchase offers let average order value grow without adding friction to the sale someone was already making. 

The Results

The results of rebuilding the foundation and testing systematically:

Client testimonial

“Shashi and his team have genuinely been a catalyst for our business”

When we started working with them, our conversion rate sat at 2.5%, and after doing CRO and development work on our website for the last two years, it now sits at 5%.

Jack Rubin

Co-founder & CEO, Purdy & Figg

Key Takeaways

• Traffic growth without a conversion foundation is just an expensive treadmill. A slow, generic theme means more ad spend just buys you more visitors bouncing faster. 
• Fix measurement before you fix anything else. A broken analytics layer makes every subsequent decision a guess dressed up as data.
• CRO works best as an ongoing discipline. A one-time facelift might buy a short-term bump, but an ongoing, hypothesis-driven testing program compounds. The gains here were built over years, not weeks.
• Test the order you tell your story, not just the words. The single biggest lift in this program came from re-sequencing, not rewriting.

Ready to Turn Traffic into Revenue?

Doubling conversion here wasn’t about a single redesign. It was about building a foundation and a discipline that compounds over time. If your store is fighting a similar uphill battle where traffic is growing but conversion is flat, with a bloated theme and data you can't fully trust - that's exactly where we start.