Ridge has experienced incredible growth since its initial Kickstarter roots. Today, the wallet and accessory brand is an eight-figure business with loyal customers around the globe.
And their growth is only accelerating. They have six global stores and they launch hundreds of products regularly. In 2024, they launched product lines in partnership with Major League Baseball and the NFL. Most recently, they launched the Ridge Peanuts Collection, featuring Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and other beloved characters of the Peanuts gang.
As their growth accelerated, the Ridge team had to stay agile and work efficiently while continuing to maintain.
While they initially built pages on a case-by-case basis, Senior Manager, e-Commerce, Mike De Lia, and Ridge’s Marketing and Development teams concluded they needed a more scalable process for creating and launching new site content.
Maintaining a consistent look and feel is essential for any growing brand and Ridge is no exception. Iconic brands, like Ridge, know that a strong visual identity across all assets enables them to stand apart from their competition and win over shoppers’ trust.
But having a large development team is not an option for Ridge’s web team. They focus on working efficiently and keeping their headcount low and costs down.
So how could they efficiently launch hundreds of product pages across six different instances and keep the same look and feel without spending hours of development time?
For Mike, the answer was standardization. The Ridge team needed to create a standard operating procedure for the development and marketing teams to work together to launch new pages quickly. And, of course, as Mike explained, “We needed a tool that helped with go-to-market perspective and keeps costs down.”
Mike and his team leveraged Shogun’s Custom Elements to create a scalable process of building pages for the development and marketing teams.
Custom Elements are dynamic components built by developers that marketing and content teams can easily reuse in their content creation process.
Mike and his team have created 40 reusable custom elements that the marketing team regularly uses to build pages quickly. The priority is that these elements are easy to add to a page. Mike explains, “We created our own Lego set for when we want to build a page quickly or swap something out.”
For example, Ridge’s team created a custom element promoting the wallet's unique value proposition that they add to every wallet product page.
The Ridge team crafted a development process that works smoothly for everyone involved. When the Marketing team needs something custom, Mike works with the Chief Marketing Officer and Art Director to identify what information they need, and the design process starts in Figma.
Mike’s role is to ensure that every element is standardized. Once everything meets design standards, the element is sent to the development team to turn it into a reusable element and to double-check every detail, like margins and sizing. From there, it goes back to the design and marketing team to use when they create or edit any page
Once a page is ready to publish, the Ridge team can easily scale it across markets with Shogun’s syncing feature. Syncing allows brands to sync page updates from one site to another with the click of a button. The Ridge is a global brand with six sites and maintaining every update across those sites could be a logistical challenge, but they rely on syncing to do the heavy lifting.
“Syncing is one of the greatest features that helped us, and it allowed us to bring all these products to different markets,” Mike explains.
The Ridge’s team creates a product page for their US site and an international version of that page and then they’ll sync that to each of their stores in Australia, Canada, the UK and other countries.
Combining their page creation processes with Shogun’s tools, they have created a streamlined and efficient go-to-market system.
Now that Ridge has a set of standard operating procedures, the team can work faster and smarter, which is critical for a lean team. Mike can be more hands-off and trust his team to follow the process and own site updates so he can focus on higher-level initiatives.
And the team can keep up with the fast-moving pace of their marketing strategies. For example, if an ad creative takes off, they already have custom elements ready to create a destination quickly.
Additionally, Ridge is poised to continue expanding their product line. “This past year, we’ve launched more products than ever,” Mike says. “We wouldn't have been able to do that without a SaaS product like Shogun and, on the flip side, our own standardization process.”
Mike advises other operators working with lean teams and striving for efficient excellence is to create a set process and leverage the tools to make that process run smoothly.
“If you’re a business like Ridge and you need to make changes quickly, there’s no point in reinventing the wheel every time,” he says.
When tools like custom elements and syncing are combined with a solid set of standard operating procedures, lean teams can enable a streamlined go-to-market process that allows them to do more with less overhead.
As for Mike and the Ridge marketing and development teams, they continue to steadily expand their business, pivot quickly, and launch efficiently, with a little help from Shogun.
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