Evolving Rusty: A Future-Ready Shopify Experience
Background
Rusty is a laid-back surfwear brand known for blending coastal attitude with casual, street-ready style.
Rusty has been in partnership with us since 2019, when we originally built their Shopify site. At a pivotal point in their digital evolution, we revisited the platform, aligned with the release of Shopify’s Horizon framework, to deliver a full redesign focused on greater flexibility, scalability, and long-term future readiness.
Challenges
Rusty’s existing platform created several barriers to growth:
• Limited agility due to rigid theme architecture
• Heavy reliance on third-party tools to enable core functionality
• Rising operational costs and complexity from maintaining multiple systems
• Dependency on developers for routine content and merchandising updates
These challenges slowed campaign execution, restricted innovation, and made it difficult for the team to respond quickly to market opportunities.
Approach
We focused on four strategic priorities:
• Simplify the ecosystem by reducing third-party dependencies
• Empower internal teams with greater control over content and merchandising
• Build a scalable foundation aligned with Shopify’s evolving capabilities
• Elevate the design and customer experience to better reflect Rusty’s evolving brand
This approach combined technical simplification with a design-led rethink of the customer experience.
Design & Experience
The redesign brought Rusty’s evolving brand to life through a product-led, visually immersive experience. Clean layouts, strong typography, and a focus on lifestyle imagery created a cohesive journey from homepage to checkout. Navigation was simplified to reduce friction and guide users seamlessly toward purchase, while content and storytelling were elevated to reinforce brand identity.
''Our long-standing partnership with Convert made this project an exciting one to bring to life. They delivered a site rebuild that supports our brand repositioning and future growth. The process was smooth end-to-end, and launching just ahead of peak season was a big win. We continue to work closely with the team on our broader digital strategy.''
Meg Rabe, Ecommerce and Digital Marketing Manager, Rusty
Key Initiatives
Elevating Merchandising Agility on Shopify
Rusty’s merchandising experience was previously constrained by development dependency, limiting the team’s ability to respond quickly to trading opportunities and campaign moments.
Working within the Shopify ecosystem, we focused on unlocking greater autonomy for the merchandising team through more flexible, self-serve capabilities. This included the introduction of dynamic collection merchandising, “Shop the Look” experiences, and a restructured product architecture designed to improve navigability and surface discovery more intuitively.
Campaigns can now be launched and iterated with significantly greater speed, while product discovery and conversion pathways have become more fluid and commercially effective.
Driving Engagement and Lifecycle Value
A key opportunity existed in extending the customer journey beyond a single browsing session, particularly for high-intent shoppers who were not always converting immediately.
To address this, we implemented a connected retention ecosystem leveraging best-in-class tools. This included Swym wishlist functionality, back-in-stock alerts, and deeper lifecycle marketing integration through Klaviyo, alongside loyalty and review capabilities via Yotpo.
Together, these capabilities created a structured way to capture intent and re-engage customers over time with greater precision. This has strengthened retention performance, increased repeat engagement, and contributed to a higher overall lifetime value.
"Rusty needed a clear way to keep high-intent shoppers in the journey between visits. Swym's wishlist and back-in-stock tools give the brand a product-level intent signal, and the data to bring those shoppers back at the right moment through tailored marketing towards the products they spent time on.''
Hugh Russell-Parsons, Head of APAC, Swym
Engineering Demand for Product Launch Moments
Product launches previously lacked the infrastructure to build anticipation in a structured and scalable way.
We introduced a more intentional launch framework using Shopify-native and integrated capabilities, including locked “Coming Soon” collections, countdown experiences, and embedded email capture flows.
This transformed product drops from standalone events into orchestrated campaigns. The result has been stronger pre-launch engagement, increased audience capture ahead of release, and improved conversion performance at the point of launch.
Simplifying the Commerce Stack within Shopify
As the platform evolved, a reliance on fragmented third-party systems had introduced unnecessary complexity, cost overhead, and operational friction. We worked to consolidate core commerce functionality within Shopify’s native capabilities, reducing reliance on external tooling and improving long-term scalability. This included migrating search and discovery into Shopify Search & Discovery, enabling native back-in-stock and pre-order functionality, and streamlining fulfilment operations through Starshipit.
By rationalising the stack, Rusty now operates on a more cohesive and performant foundation. The result is a reduced total cost of ownership, improved site stability, and a significantly simpler system to manage and scale.
+50%
Increase in Sessions
(3 Months Post-Launch vs Previous Year)
+4%
Increase in AOV
(3 Months Post-Launch vs Previous Year)
+41%
Increase in Orders
(3 Months Post-Launch vs Previous Year)
The Outcome
Rusty now operates on a streamlined, scalable commerce platform designed to deliver both immediate performance improvements and sustained long-term growth. The new setup provides greater control over content and merchandising, reduces reliance on developers and third-party tools, and significantly improves day-to-day operational efficiency.
With enhanced customer engagement and stronger conversion opportunities, the platform is built to support evolving business needs. The result is a completely refreshed site featuring a modern look and feel, improved functionality, and far greater autonomy for the Rusty team. By leveraging the new theme architecture, the brand can move faster, experiment more freely, and adapt with confidence as it continues to grow.
