Studs, an experiential retail and ecommerce brand, has reimagined the ear piercing experience. Studs believes pierced ears are the key to unlocking self-expression, reinvention, and to discovering a Hole New You. Studs coined the term Earscape® by providing their customers with a new way to self-express through healthy and safe ear piercings and on-trend earrings in both a retail environment and an online experience at Studs.com.
Over the past two years, Studs has opened multiple piercing studios across New York, as well as studios in Los Angeles, Boston, Nashville, Austin, and Miami. Studs’ successful expansion is proof that smart, fast, and built-to-scale technology is essential when creating a scalable and memorable shopping experience.
Launching Piercing
Studs has reimagined the ear piercing experience, and the brand has made themselves a go-to destination for safe piercings and trend-conscious earrings. The company’s ambitious growth goals included scaling their piercing service studios along with their fashion ecommerce business. The team knew it was critical to make a seamless, yet differentiated journey between their D2C ecommerce fashion sales business and their piercing booking experience. Three factors were top of mind when executing a digital roadmap for their in-person piercing experience:
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Establishing Trust — As soon as the user gets to the landing page, it is important to have the Studs brand highlighted. But, users should quickly learn that Studs is a unique in-person service offering a different ecommerce flow than they may be accustomed to. This is especially important since there is a huge difference between fashion jewelry for healed holes and piercing jewelry to freshly pierce ears.
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Educating the Customer — The brand’s claim to fame is piercing with single-use needles instead of guns. It is important for customers to understand what to expect, including pricing, the types of Studs services available, and the terminology around different types of piercings.
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Iterating and Building Quickly — To support a large retail studio roll out, the digital team created a piercing page to educate customers before their appointments. The team needed to be able to quickly launch and update store pages, with services such as store waitlists, early bookings pages, and offerings for opening week. With Replo, the team could make quick changes, such as changing store content, and adding directional maps, email captures, content and offerings, without developer involvement.
Challenge
With Studs' rapid omni-channel expansion on the horizon, the Studs team had to build many campaigns and pages without compromising their budget on developer resources.
The Studs team wanted to achieve an aggressive launch plan without compromising current developer work streams and budget. Previously, each campaign launch typically required a huge amount of collaboration between designers, product managers, digital marketers, and the development team. As more retail stores opened and new collaborations were launched, Studs required more landing pages, and needed the ability to edit prior pages. Editing these pages was time-consuming, and took valuable developer time away from more complicated projects, which meant that Studs had to say no to ideas more often. This set-up left a lot of room for improvement for the up-and-coming brand.
“With Replo, our digital team is able to support our company’s growing marketing site needs. It’s been a game changer for managing developer and design resources, cost — especially in a timely manner.”
YuJin, VP of Digital Product @ Studs
The team had evaluated other solutions in the past, but each had their own disadvantages —
Tools like Webflow provided the design and marketing teams with more flexibility, but integrated poorly with Shopify. The digital team wasn’t able to access critical Shopify data like product metafields and user data. The pages also had to be hosted on a completely separate domain, which impacted how the team tracked analytics and engagement.
Existing landing page builder apps work great for smaller businesses getting started on Shopify, but these apps lack customizability and slow down the site to a crawl. Ultimately these solutions weren’t extensible enough for the team to create the type of world-class experience they knew their customers wanted.
Solution
After assessing a number of product demos and evaluating their options, the Studs team decided to build their piercing experience on Replo. Using Replo was the only solution that truly enabled the design and marketing team to go from Figma to Shopify without any developer involvement and without compromising on Studs branding or site performance.
While building out a single page, using Replo saved Studs over 20+ hours of development time, freeing up their developers to work on higher complexity projects, like developing an on-demand booking waitlist. Using Replo also eliminated the need for standups or back and forth Zoom calls. Since Replo exists directly on Shopify, Studs was able to keep all their analytics and pull content from their existing assets in Shopify, which made it even easier to build using Replo.
With Replo, Studs was able to:
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Stay on brand — Studs used Replo’s powerful visual editor to stay on brand across their entire piercing flow.
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Build interactive experiences — Studs used Replo’s CMS and enabled creative, purposeful animations and interactions, which educated potential visitors about piercings.
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Build reusable components — Studs saved pre-built components into a component library, which could then be re-used to quickly build new content on other pages.
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Track and respond to how users engage — By using Fullstory and Replo, the Studs team could analyze user behavior and identify issues. Commonly asked support questions were updated live on Studs' pages in a matter of minutes.
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Improve site speed — Studs experienced no slow-down on page load times. Powerful features like small bundle sizes and image lazy-loading appeared easily, without any extra code.
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Build mobile-first content — With Replo, Studs was able to take a mobile-first approach to content and design, enabling highly engaging digital experiences for their target audience
“I highly recommend Replo for companies looking to build pages quickly and efficiently while upholding high brand standards.”
Jane Hur, Senior Product Manager @ Studs
Set for Growth
Replo’s visual editor + CMS was a game-changer for Studs on their mission to revolutionize the piercing industry. After building the in-store piercing flow on Replo, Studs began to use the Replo platform for everything from gift guides to location pages for all their nationwide brick-and-mortar stores.
In 2022, as their team continues growing and the number of in-store piercing locations expands, the Studs team plans on using Replo even more frequently. Replo empowered the Studs design and digital teams to move fast and to take back control of their own destiny and storytelling.