Skullcandy is a brand that vibrates with color. You’ll recognize their distinctive headphones by their rainbow bright hues—match your headphones to your outfit, your mood, or perhaps to the statement you want to make to the world.
That’s Skullcandy: a unique brand that finds its identity in being different—and also in constant innovation, as they’ve expanded into earbuds, gaming, speakers, and more.
For the Skullcandy team, finding a platform as innovative as their product has been a long journey—two decades long, to be precise.
The team found themselves constantly hampered by their previous platforms’ inability to provide them with the agility they needed to continually experiment, find new paths to revenue, reach new markets, and grow.
That’s all changed on Shopify, which they migrated to in just 90 days.
With Shopify, Skullcandy is now able to:
- Move faster: They can now launch products on the site in less than 30 minutes—down from one to two days on their previous platform—and can test out new features and channels with a few clicks.
- Worry less about site reliability and UX: The Skullcandy team feels more empowered to experiment and try new things due to the ease and low risk of the platform. Immediately upon going live on Shopify, their homepage load time improved to 0.8 seconds from 2.6 seconds.
- Focus on growth over maintenance: Overall, the shift to Shopify enabled Skullcandy to focus more on strategic growth initiatives and less on managing platform limitations.
Challenges
Lack of agility to capitalize on business opportunities
Twenty-one years since launch, Skullcandy still operates in many ways like a startup, in the best senses of that word. Constantly looking for ways to innovate, move quickly, and try new things is the tune they groove to.
In those two decades of business, they tried it all in their hunt for a platform that could keep them sharp and able to pivot as they stay one step ahead in a competitive market.
The first two platforms they were on, Adobe Commerce (Magento) and Salesforce Commerce Cloud (formerly Demandware), were too big and complex, and didn’t allow the Skullcandy team to tailor much themselves—meaning they had to rely on expensive development resources and consultants to get the job done.
So when they decided to move off of Demandware onto BigCommerce, they were excited about the opportunity to be more self-sufficient. Over time though, things got complex again, and the Skullcandy team realized that they’d need a more agile platform if they wanted to hit their ambitious ecommerce goals.
All of that customization also had another inadvertent consequence: It made the site extremely brittle, which discouraged innovation. “We noticed some vulnerabilities and an aging code base that was starting to hold us back,” says Jenny Buchar, director of digital strategy and product at Skullcandy.
"It can be disheartening to strategize a new feature only to hear, 'We have that on the roadmap, but it's about six months away,'” she adds.
"Our operating model just wasn't offering the agility that we needed, both organizationally and on the platform side,” says Evin Catlett, vice president of global ecommerce and growth marketing.
Our operating model just wasn't offering the agility that we needed.
For Scott Wickberg of Wick Creative, Skullcandy’s development partner, these are common scars for brands migrating to Shopify from competing platforms—scars that require a “couple of beer drinking sessions” to work through.
“Everyone wants to be innovating and doing cool things, especially in a cool industry, working on a cool product,” says Scott. “That’s why you got into the craft that you're into, not to keep the lights on. They’d never been able to really fully communicate the brand in the way they wanted to because they didn’t have the opportunity to be flexible, and ultimately, any boundary to flexibility is a barrier to innovation.”
The Skullcandy brand was growing quickly, and the team knew that their ecommerce business was becoming increasingly important to their brand. With a new executive team on board and ready to take the brand in a new, exciting direction, it was clear that the current way of doing things wasn’t going to get them there.
The Skullcandy team set themselves three clear goals
They were simple, yet provided much needed clarity:
- Get on a stable platform
- Increase revenue
- Be agile
Success would mean creating a lightweight operating model to lower the burden on the team to keep their site both beautiful and performant.
And they needed to do it very quickly.
Specifically, by March.
It was December.
“‘We have three months to redesign and replatform the website, so I'll meet with you several times a week to expedite approvals,’" Jenny recalls telling the digital, brand and IT teams. In a world where it’s not uncommon for replatforming projects to take around 9-12 months, 90 days was ambitious.
But with everyone on board and Wick Creative ready to go, they got to work—and did it.
Solution
A smooth and accelerated migration to a more agile platform
From the start, the Skullcandy team benefited from buy-in for their mission on an organizational level—and clarity on what that mission was.
“We laid out a clear set of requirements, covering system integrations, customer experience, organizational efficiency, and what would position us for future growth,” Evin recalls.
But perhaps most important to the success of the migration? The team.
“I remember sitting down with the Skullcandy team and immediately thinking ‘Alright, we’re going to be good,’” recalls Scott. “I knew this was the type of team that would be in the trenches with us. Having confidence and excitement from the team—it’s what makes this type of ambitious project possible.”
The goals for migration were ambitious, and yet the project actually moved faster than expected.
Says Jenny: “Three weeks after kickoff, the IT team approached me on the status of order flow and back-end integrations saying, 'We’re done, should we move to the international regions now?'” We were amazed.
I challenged the team with an aggressive timeline: to go live in our top market within just 90 days. Initially, there was concern and a lot of doubt. But once we officially kicked off, everybody quickly saw a path to, ‘This is actually going to happen.’
In fact, it was so amazing, the team couldn’t stop themselves from suspecting that something was wrong—that they were overlooking something. But the other shoe never dropped.
“It was one of the best and most successful implementations for its size that I’ve been involved with,” says Mark.
Streamlined experiences on the front and back end
The goal of the migration to Shopify was to both streamline operations and enhance flexibility. On the back end, Shopify allowed for quicker and more efficient content creation and management for all users, while uniting diffuse data systems.
“Product data, inventory data, sales order flow, fulfillment,” says Mark. “We do fulfillment for our websites, but we also do fulfillment for third-party dropship vendors. We have our ERP system. From a technical perspective, my team has appreciated the way that Shopify thinks about the integration of the Shopify environment to other environments. We're real fans of their well-thought-out APIs and GraphQL environment—using that to query the database and make changes.”
On the front end, there’s been a similar kind of streamlining in terms of an overhauled UX/UI experience.
“We were highly focused on the consumer journey,” says Evin. “As Skullcandy’s flagship digital experience, we needed to strike a balance between educating consumers about our products, inspiring them with our brand, and providing a compelling value proposition. At the same time, we wanted to ensure a seamless transaction process for those ready to purchase. Shopify gave us a clear path to achieve all of that.”
We now have a testing strategy that allows us to iterate, learn, and improve in a highly agile way, whether through Shopify's native tools or by integrating third-party apps. Even with unique or edge cases, designing tests is straightforward. We can easily say, ‘I want to try this, I want to test that,’ and the ecosystem provides the flexibility to make it happen.
Results
The ability to grow strategically—in whatever ways they dream up
Standing up the new site in three months allowed Skullcandy to speed up their time to value. The team saw no loss in conversion post-launch and no spike in customer service cases, allowing for immediate transition from a launch mentality to optimization.
The seamless integration with other tech partners immediately reduced complexity, allowing the team to focus on enhancing consumer experiences.
And there has been a significant reduction in the time required to bring new products to life on the site—from a day and a half to less than 30 minutes.
There was a time post-launch where we kept saying, what are we missing? Why is this so easy? There has to be something that we're overlooking that's going wrong that we're not aware of. It was a very smooth launch with immediate stability.
Built-in autonomy empowers employees and reduces burnout
Shopify allows for quicker and more efficient content creation and management.
“We can tell that our brand and creative teams are excited about this because we get to say yes a lot more,” says Jenny. “We were frequently calling out setup limitations, but now we can usually report, ‘That should be possible,’ and confirm after quick discovery. It’s really exciting. It’s given us agility and flexibility so we can respond to suggestions and requests from stakeholders more quickly.”
It’s led to a real shift in mentality and a reduction in burnouts.
“The challenge of quickly responding to consumer behaviors and evolving business needs has been eased with our transition to Shopify,” says Jenny.
"It's very easy to be experimental,” agrees Mark. “It's very easy to put something in, back it out if you don't like it. So much excitement has been generated on my team.”
It has allowed us to focus on growth and innovation rather than managing daily tasks.
Enhanced customer experiences and faster site speeds
The UI and UX overhauls have been executed without a hitch. Customers love the new experience, including Shop Pay Installments, which saw an immediately uptick in usage post-launch. And because it’s so much easier and faster to stand up a new product description page, as well as A/B test, the content team is now empowered to experiment more to enhance that experience.
“We’re allowing customers to have a faster and more pleasant experience,” says Jenny. “Our most-trafficked, highest-revenue-driving product page now loads in half the time—it used to load in 9.4 seconds. Now it loads in 4.2. And the homepage load time has reduced from 2.6 seconds to 0.8. We also went from a fair user experience score at 79% to an excellent score at 94% within a week of launching on Shopify. That’s amazing.”
One of the things that stood out to us almost immediately was the improvement in site vitals. When we looked at our scores for speed, for accessibility, those significantly improved on day one.
Less time managing platform limitations, more time on strategic growth
Overall, the platform shift to Shopify has enabled Skullcandy to focus more on strategic growth initiatives and less on managing platform limitations.
“Commerce moves fast. It's a moving target,” says Scott. “It’s great that the Skullcandy team isn’t in maintenance mode anymore, because eventually they would have fallen behind. Instead, now they’re focused on those additional growth opportunities.”
And there are a lot of them. The team would know: Future growth opportunities were prime in their mind when selecting a new platform. They wanted the one that offered the most paths to future-proofing their business.
“Without replatforming to Shopify, we wouldn’t have been able to turn our attention to those strategic growth initiatives as quickly,” adds Evin.
Ambitious goals, ambitious products, ambitious growth: That’s what Skullcandy is all about. And on Shopify, they can make it all happen.
Over time, we had to make a lot of customizations. We recognized that there were definitely limitations in terms of agility, experimentation, and we were still reliant on development partners to get work done. It had all gotten a bit complex.
