The Perspective #13

Author

Oddit Team
September 15, 2022

Welcome to the 13th edition of The Perspective by Oddit!

Twice a month we send out actionable tips for creating brand-first and conversion-optimized customer experiences from the best in DTC.

In this edition 🗞:

  • Brand-first breakdown with GIGANTIC

  • 5 questions with Fabio Molle, Founder of Functional Tennis

  • Mobile Homepage Makeover

  • New brands we discovered this month

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If you missed our last editions, you can read them here! 

Brand-First Breakdown: GIGANTIC

GIGANTIC creates plant-based candy bars with just 7g of sugar and real ingredients including Madagascar vanilla, almond butter, and coconut milk.

We're breaking down their website and offering a couple of tweaks to make it an even better user experience and conversion machine. Let's jump in!

Desktop navigation

Suggestions to test:

Suggestion 1: Be more clear about your free shipping offer by making it higher contrast.

Suggestion 2: Pull in an actual desktop navigation, rather than the mobile drawer. Making actions easily accessible is half the battle for getting clicks.

Suggestion 3: Place your products in one dropdown, and everything else in another!

Suggestion 4: Add a primary action to the nav, and make sure it’s the loudest element in your navigation!

Mobile Menu

Suggestions to test:

Suggestion 1: Pull out your key actions into larger dropdowns/visuals. For products in particular, you can even show the product images!

Suggestion 2: Make all your secondary actions look less like your primary ones. Reduce contrast, remove bounding box, and make them smaller!

Suggestion 3: Allow your menu to take over the entire screen – this leaves users with no distractions!

Homepage Cross Section

Suggestions to test:

Suggestion 1: Lead with the headline, rather than the very tall image that pushes actions down.

Suggestion 2: Call out the key traits in a simpler format right off the bat.

Suggestion 3: Your headline talks about 4 flavors, but then you don’t show them – SHOW THEM, and give users access to shop them!

Suggestion 4: Make your action full-width and make it more specific now that you have the 4 flavors clearly called out.

Socials

Suggestions to test:

Suggestion 1: Callout your customer base size or the following size in the heading

Suggestion 2: Feature customer posts showing or talking about your products. If they are videos, even better – just make sure it’s easy to play!

Suggestion 3: Pull in a simple punchy quote from each post.

Suggestion 4: Let users scroll through a few posts

For bonus points, link users out to the product featured in each post!

Reviews

Suggestions to test:

Suggestion 1: Add a cross-section that calls out some featured reviews of the product. Focus the reviews on the traits of the product you want users to know!

Suggestion 2: Pull in a heading and a simple snippet of the review. If it’s a really long review, just pull in a sentence or two.

Suggestion 3: Allow users to swipe through 3-5 of them!

Want us to look at your website? Check out the Oddit Premium Report! 

Founders Five 🖐

Founder: Fabio Molle is the founder of Functional Tennis which created The Saber Racket. A training racket that helps players locate the sweet spot and focus on fundamentals.

The racket is used by some of the greatest tennis players in the world including Novak Djokovic!

Oddit: The Saber racket is used by some of the greatest Tennis players in the world, but in the beginning what tactics did you utilize to get your product in their hands?

Fabio: There's no one answer here but they're all them from one main source - our Functional Tennis Instagram. It’s now 6 years old, the biggest solo run tennis account and over these years I’ve built up relationships with players, the coaching team of players, and top academies.

The saber has only been available since May but looking back here are some more ways:

  • Players/coaches have directly bought the product

  • With my relationships, I’ve managed to get great access at tournaments so I can directly gift players/coaches

  • Promised Players/coaches early access to the saber

  • Players and their agents have directly requested the product

  • Having the product in key locations where players train so a chance they will come across it

  • Our Instagram fans (& saber customers) saying they can get a certain player to use the product (and delivering!)

As you can see there is a great mix and also importantly It’s also a great product which is very useful and the best players are always looking at ways to make themselves better.

I previously and still do sell a more hardcore version called the tennis pointer (basically a giant wooden spoon) and I employed a similar strategy there.

Oddit: Since there’s such massive demand, currently the racket is sold out — how do you deal with supply chain issues while keeping customers happy?

Fabio: This has been a learning curve for me. I didn’t really expect the product to do so well initially and then I didn't think I would have to wait a huge amount of time to get a manufacturing slot.

We have a great manufacturer that is used by some of the best racket brands and trying to squeeze in slots has been difficult but as the manufacturer starts believing more in our product and potential, this has helped. Also, COVID is still a concern and can reduce manufacturing time with decreased workforce and temporary factory shutdowns.

I now have a pipeline of products arriving but we have just launched our 2nd pre-launch and it will probably be early next year before I get a better idea of forecasting moving forward.

With regards to customers, I try to be as open as possible with them throughout the process which I feel they appreciate. I try to build up the pre-launches and their arrival of them to keep them excited. I’ve recently decided to take the extra hit and fly in our next batch of sabers greatly reducing the transit time and ensuring our wait list can get sabers for Christmas.

People do get impatient but thankfully refunds have been at a minimum and 99% of customers have been amazing.

Oddit: Your Instagram is massive — almost half a million followers. What’s been the biggest catapult to such a following?

Fabio: I have no idea!! Right time / Right place!

It started as an account to help showcase exercises to players in their 30s. My body was starting to hurt in my 30s and I thought there must be others like that out in the world so I said let’s start sharing content and it just grew. The more I shared the more it grew. The content slowly evolved and the audience kept growing. We now share a mix of tennis-related content from products, upcoming players, interesting drills, quotes, insight at major tournaments, and more.

We reshare a lot of videos and ever since it started I’ve made it the number 1 mission to ensure all creators get credited for their work. With the excitement, creators would get from new followers and the messages they would get, they would send in more videos. This has been a driving force since the early days. We also now work with coaches, players, and academies to create content directly for us as well as having people at tournaments kindly send through videos.

I ideally would like to be at least at every major tournament to create content but it’s difficult with the website, 2 children and 2 weeks at a slam get expensive!!

Oddit: What’s the most recent site adjustment you’ve made that had the greatest impact on revenue?

Fabio: Changing to a Shopify 2.0 theme has been fantastic. The site looks so much better, runs smoother and I’ve finally removed the page builder Shogun which I used for years. I’m just started testing a slide cart with upsells but can’t confirm yet if I’ll be keeping it.

I feel the site from a content and especially copy point of view needs a lot more work and is something I plan to spend time on in early 2023.

Oddit: Who’s someone you haven’t had but would love to host on your podcast?

Fabio: The dream would be any of the GOATS, Federer, Serena, Nadal or Djokovic. They all have areas which I find really interesting and getting access to these would be amazing. I’ve been lucky to meet Novak a few times who is super nice. He also has a Saber and maybe one day I can get him on!

Also, many times our most popular episodes don’t; come from top players but from coaches or great storytellers. 

Mobile Homepage Makeover

Classifieds 🔎

👀 Davie Fogarty breaks down his Oddit Report and how we helped his 200 million/year website increase CVR

📣 Where's Oddit: Spot the 4 changes we made to this product page

🔵 New brands we discovered this month: Sensate, SoaPen, Clixo, and Disco Country Club 

🚀 Shopify introduces new features to help businesses sell internationally

Want your own brand-first breakdown? 🚨

Check out the essential and premium reports!

If you don’t find any value you’ll get all your $$ back. No questions asked.

The Perspective is written by Shaun Brandt, Taylor Davies, and Thomas Schreiber

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