Salt & Stone: more than $7M in additional annual revenue.

The challenge

Salt & Stone sells premium personal care. Premium brands carry a particular conversion problem: the product earns its price in the hand, but online the visitor has to be persuaded by the page, and every point of friction gives them a reason to wait.

The brand came to us searching for ways to improve its conversion rate. That meant finding where real shoppers hesitated before deciding what to test.

What we did

• Removed friction found in session recordings. We watched how shoppers actually moved through the store and removed the points where they stalled, backtracked or left. Recordings show the problems analytics only hints at.
• Rebuilt the navigation around the most-clicked links. The menu was redesigned around the links visitors clicked most.
• Experimented continuously on high-impact areas. High-traffic placements such as the homepage hero banner were tested continuously rather than redesigned once and left alone.
• Tested product placement for merchandising. We tested where products appeared and in what combination to find the merchandising mix that sold best.
• Added post-purchase upsells. Offers after the order is placed add order value without risking the conversion that already happened.

How the program ran

Different brands, different profit levers, same process every time. For Salt & Stone, as for every client, the work started with research: session recordings, heat maps, analytics, reviews and the questions customers ask. Ideas were ranked by expected business impact, then designed, written and built in-house. Each change was checked by QA before and after launch, and results were read against revenue, order value and margin rather than clicks.

Winners shipped in coordination with the brand’s own team. Losing tests were reported in the same detail as winners, because a program learns as much from what does not work. Andrew Cowan, Parah Group’s founder and a former brand-side CMO, runs every account personally, so the person reading the results is the person deciding what comes next.

The result

The program added more than $7 million in additional annual revenue. Every number in this case study was published with the client’s permission.

What other brands can take from this

• Watch real sessions before testing; they decide what deserves a test.
• Navigation is a conversion lever, not a design detail.
• High-traffic areas reward continuous testing more than one-off redesigns.

Related services: The CRO Program, Ecommerce CRO, A/B testing. More results are on the case studies page, and the person behind every account is introduced on About Andrew Cowan.