Running Hat Club's Shopify business as interim E-Commerce director

Hat Club is a headwear retailer that started in Arizona as an all-hat store and grew into a chain of shops across several states. Its best sellers online are the exclusives it designs in-house, mostly New Era fitteds, not the stock caps that move in its stores.

Online sales had slipped after a move onto Magento, and the brand had since switched to Shopify. The store and its point-of-sale system didn't talk to each other: products were entered by hand on Shopify, and web orders were rung up again on a store register. There was no one in-house running E-Commerce marketing.

Hat Club brought DYODE in as its interim E-Commerce director. The scope covered the online business end to end: E-Commerce strategy and budget, the site's design and usability, acquisition and retention marketing, reporting, and the processes behind product setup, customer service and orders.

We started with an audit and turned it into a digital roadmap. Every tactic had an objective, a channel, a priority and an owner, either DYODE or Hat Club, so both teams could see what was done and what came next.

On search, we set up a Google Shopping feed and ran brand and non-brand paid search campaigns. We set up Hat Club's Facebook ad account and wrote a paid social plan split into prospecting, lapsed-customer and retargeting audiences, and added dynamic remarketing.

On email, we refined the signup offer, added a signup popup, and built the welcome, post-purchase, birthday and abandoned-cart flows in Klaviyo. We also set up an affiliate program and automated the weekly and monthly reports.

We defined the site's feature list, implemented a new Shopify theme built from it, and redesigned the homepage. We set a naming and description policy for products and proposed a new navigation and taxonomy for a catalog of thousands of caps.

Behind the store, we worked with Hat Club and its point-of-sale vendor on the requirements for syncing products, inventory and orders with Shopify, and documented the team's procedures for product setup, customer service and order handling. We also sketched options for a Hat Club membership, from a monthly hat club to a points program.

Hat Club got an E-Commerce function it hadn't had: a roadmap with clear owners, a new Shopify theme and homepage, a Google Shopping feed and search campaigns, paid social, and Klaviyo email flows that run on their own.

Most of the must-do items on the roadmap that DYODE owned were marked complete, and the team came away with documented processes and regular reports to keep running the store.