Scaling a Direct-to-Consumer Brand

Overview

Nomad Goods sells premium travel accessories to a discerning audience. Their products are exceptional, but their digital experience wasn’t keeping pace. With 70% of traffic coming from mobile devices, performance issues were directly impacting revenue.

The Challenge

The existing Shopify theme had been customized extensively over three years, resulting in bloated code and poor performance. Page load times averaged 6.2 seconds on mobile—well above the 3-second threshold where users start abandoning.

Specific issues:

• 6.2s average mobile load time
• Cart abandonment rate of 78%
• Mobile conversion rate 40% below desktop
• Product pages lacked the editorial quality of their Instagram presence

Our Approach

Performance-First Architecture

We made a strategic decision to build a headless commerce solution using Astro and Shopify’s Storefront API. This gave us complete control over the frontend while leveraging Shopify’s robust e-commerce infrastructure.

Key technical decisions:

• Static generation for product pages with ISR for inventory
• Aggressive image optimization with modern formats (WebP, AVIF)
• Critical CSS inlining and async loading for non-critical styles
• Edge caching through Cloudflare

Experience Design

Performance was necessary but not sufficient. We needed to translate Nomad’s brand essence—thoughtful, minimal, premium—into the shopping experience.

Product pages became editorial experiences:

• Large-format photography with zoom on hover
• Contextual storytelling about materials and craftsmanship
• Social proof integrated naturally (not as a desperate widget)

The checkout flow was streamlined:

• Reduced form fields by 40%
• Added express checkout options prominently
• Implemented real-time shipping calculations
• Guest checkout as the default path

Mobile-First Navigation

With 70% mobile traffic, we designed mobile-first for the first time in Nomad’s history. The navigation prioritizes:

• Quick access to bestsellers
• Easy filtering without modals
• Thumb-friendly interaction zones
• Persistent cart preview

The Outcome

The new site launched after a 12-week development cycle:

• -48% load time (6.2s → 3.2s average on mobile)
• +24% average order value through better cross-selling
• -31% cart abandonment with streamlined checkout
• +18% mobile conversion rate within 60 days

The performance improvements alone generated an estimated $340,000 in additional annual revenue based on reduced abandonment.

“We knew our site was slow, but we didn’t realize how much it was costing us. The new experience feels like our brand finally.”

— Marcus Webb, Founder, Nomad Goods

Technical Highlights

• 98 Lighthouse Performance score (up from 34)
• Core Web Vitals: LCP 1.8s, FID 12ms, CLS 0.02
• 0.5s Time to First Byte via edge caching
• 95% reduction in JavaScript payload

This project demonstrated that performance is a feature—perhaps the most important feature in e-commerce.