How Lucy & Yak turned an ageing storefront into a growth engine
A sustainable fashion brand in United States. Full-stack Shopify engagement covering product page redesign, checkout and payments optimisation, internationalisation and ongoing optimisation.
How it started
When the Lucy & Yak team first shared their analytics, the pattern was familiar: healthy traffic, respectable product interest, and a checkout that let too many of those shoppers slip away. In sustainable fashion, that gap is expensive.
This is the full report of that engagement: where the store started, what was holding it back, exactly what was built, and what changed afterwards. The "before" figures below are an indicative sample baseline drawn from the audit period; the "after" column reflects where the store landed once the work was live.
Meet Lucy & Yak
Lucy & Yak is a sustainable fashion retailer trading from United States at us.lucyandyak.com. The brand has been selling since 2008 and reached me with a catalogue that had outgrown the storefront around it.
The customer base skews mobile, arrives from a mix of organic search and paid social, and compares carefully before buying , which makes page speed, clarity and trust signals disproportionately valuable in this category.
Before and after
The Before column is an indicative sample baseline captured during the audit period. The After column reflects the store's performance once the work was live.
| Metric | Before (sample) | After (actual) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conversion rate | 1.52% | 3.85% | +153% |
| Mobile LCP | 3.9s | 1.9s | -52% |
| Average order value | $160 | $210 | +31% |
| Cart abandonment | 71% | 53% | -18 pts |
| Organic sessions / mo | 15,500 | 43,000 | +177% |
| Blended ROAS | 1.8x | 3.9x | +113% |
Relative improvement per metric. Select a metric above to see its raw before/after values.
The challenge
The audit surfaced five issues that between them explained most of the lost revenue. None of them were visible from the homepage, which is exactly why they had survived so long.
- Collection structure that buried best sellers three clicks deep
- Duplicate and thin pages competing with each other in organic search
- Internationalisation handled by redirects, hurting both UX and indexation
- Slow LCP driven by unoptimised hero imagery and third-party embeds
- Search and filtering that returned irrelevant results on large collections
The work, step by step
The engagement ran as a single programme rather than a list of tickets: fix the foundation first, then layer acquisition and retention on top of a store that can actually hold the traffic.
- 01
Product page redesign
Product templates were rewritten around the buying decision: gallery first, benefit-led copy, variant clarity, delivery expectations, returns policy and reviews all visible without hunting through tabs.
- 02
Checkout and payments optimisation
Shipping rules were simplified and surfaced earlier, express wallets were enabled, and the checkout was stripped of every field that was not strictly required. Fewer surprises, fewer drop-offs.
- 03
Internationalisation
Markets, currencies and language routing were configured properly with hreflang, so each region has an indexable storefront rather than a redirect.
- 04
Content and merchandising
Titles, descriptions and buying guides were rewritten for both shoppers and search. Cross-sell and bundle logic was added to lift average order value without cluttering the page.
- 05
App stack rationalisation
Overlapping apps were removed and their functionality moved into native theme code where it made sense , lighter pages, lower monthly spend and fewer conflicts after Shopify updates.
- 06
Technical audit and baseline
Before touching a single template I benchmarked the store: Core Web Vitals, crawl health, funnel drop-off by device, app-script weight and revenue per session. Everything that followed was measured against that baseline.
- 07
Accessibility and QA pass
Contrast, focus states, keyboard navigation and screen-reader labelling were corrected across templates, then the full purchase path was tested on real devices before release.
- 08
Klaviyo lifecycle flows
Welcome, browse-abandon, cart-abandon, post-purchase and win-back flows were built and segmented, with timing and messaging tuned to the brand's actual purchase cycle rather than a template default.
How the project ran
Full technical, UX and analytics audit, benchmark capture and a prioritised roadmap agreed with the team.
Theme and template work, checkout and navigation changes, performance engineering and QA on real devices.
Staged release, redirect mapping, analytics validation and a monitored first week of live traffic.
Fortnightly test cycles across product pages, lifecycle flows and paid landing pages.
The results
A measurably smoother checkout
Fewer steps, clearer shipping and wallet payments cut the number of shoppers lost between cart and confirmation.
Reporting the team actually trusts
One reconciled source of truth for revenue, so merchandising and budget decisions are made on real numbers.
Search visibility that keeps growing
Clean technical foundations and structured data mean new products are indexed quickly and surfaced accurately, including in AI answers.
Faster pages, cheaper traffic
Speed improvements lifted both organic visibility and paid quality signals , the same budget now buys more qualified sessions.
“This was the first time someone explained what was wrong in plain language and then actually fixed it.”
The takeaway
Lucy & Yak did not need a bigger budget. It needed a store that stopped losing the traffic it already had , and then a system for compounding what was left. That order matters, and it is the same order I would apply to your store.