Cat furniture, litter, and accessories brand Tuft + Paw knows cat owners want nothing but the best for their feline family members. That’s why founder Jackson Cunningham set out to build a brand with standards as high as the cat owners they serve.

Tuft + Paw’s Really Great Cat Litter (it actually keeps your home clean!) has been a roaring success since launching in 2016.

The brand’s high-quality cat furniture looks as elegant as something you’d see from Article or All Modern, breathing new life into the standard cat tree.

But as Tuft + Paw scaled, generating buzz, Jackson knew there was more opportunity with the brand’s owned ecommerce channel.

After great success (largely without optimizing their Shopify site), Jackson and team wanted to experiment with on-page customization.

But making edits directly in Shopify was a challenge. There was only so much the team could do without a developer from a conversion rate optimization (CRO) perspective. As Jackson shares:

“Making edits directly in Shopify was limiting. I wanted to find a page builder solution that would help me pop out five versions of a page to test to see if we could improve our conversions.” — Jackson Cunningham, Founder, Tuft + Paw

Tuft + Paw’s accelerated growth meant their team couldn’t afford to spend hours building in Shopify. They needed an ecommerce page builder to experiment, build, and launch products and campaigns faster without compromising brand consistency.

Custom landing pages in just hours meant more sales

After searching in the Shopify App Store for a landing page builder that checked Jackson’s criteria (i.e., easy to use with drag-and-drop capability, customizable, and could grow with the brand), he came across Shogun.

“After installing, it was really easy to clone an existing page and drag and drop elements. Shogun does exactly what we needed a page builder to do. There wasn’t a steep learning curve, and everything felt really well-thought-out. Whenever I needed certain functionality for a page, I could do it.” 

Now, whether creating a new custom landing page to announce a new product or giving the homepage a refresh, Jackson and his team can make new, custom Shopify content happen quickly, like this page:

In addition to customizing Shopify product and collections pages, Tuft + Paw wanted to transform the cookie-cutter Shopify blog layout to match their creative vision. For this, the brand used Shogun to create custom Shopify blog layouts.

Today, Jackson and his team can embed product boxes in posts, add customer testimonial blocks and Instagram UGC, and duplicate successful layouts each time for net new blog content.

The team spins up articles like “The Definitive Guide to Cat Behavior and Body Language” and “The Best Cat Toys of 2023 (so far),”—complete with charts, images, and custom visuals—going beyond what’s available with native Shopify.

Not only is their blog a great resource for product discovery, but it makes for high-converting ad campaign pairings, too.

Take a look at how the team transformed an existing high-performing post with a more engaging Shopify blog layout:

With control to stagger the standard listicle points, add social proof in a logo bar, and insert a prominent visual CTA, the team turned basic Shopify blog content into something more design and conversion-focused.

The change led to more shoppers making a purchase.

“We can send ads to this blog post and educate customers this way instead of sending them directly to a product page. We’ve found this especially helpful in planting the seed for future sales.”

When Jackson’s lean ecommerce team scales content creation, sourcing contractors and agencies who are familiar with Shogun is easy:

“Many people are really familiar with building in Shogun…If we need to hire a contractor, there are lots of people who know the platform really well. We can hire them to make different landing pages if we need instead of having to learn another software. That’s not super common in ecommerce.”

Overall, being able to customize how customers interact with their site has been instrumental in separating Tuft + Paw from long-standing cat litter brands like Purina’s Tidy Cats and Fresh Step.

“We can offer a more customized branded experience with Shogun. We really want to stand out and not just be another product on a shelf. With Shogun, we can spin up custom, needle-moving pages in a fraction of the time.”

Gifs and high-quality stills help Tuft + Paw convey product quality while educating their customer base. It’s easy for Jackson and his team to take Shopify site pages further by adding custom visuals wherever they see fit on the page—without any code.

Lastly, anytime the Tuft + Paw team gets stuck, Shogun support is there to help.

“Another thing I really like about Shogun is your technical support team,” says Jackson. “Anytime I’m like, ‘Oh, Shogun doesn’t have this feature,’ the support team will show me how it’s actually possible to do. This is super important to my team.”

Tuft + Paw gained agility and flexibility, and is ready to keep growing with Shogun

Since using Shogun, Tuft + Paw can publish fast and create unique, conversion-focused online shopping experiences for customers.

In fact, with their focus on adding more educational content with dynamic Shopify blog designs, and tailored campaign landing pages, they’ve seen a cumulative, relative conversion rate lift across their Shopify store of 13%.

Using Shogun’s custom templates enables the team to dupe pages and ship new iterations in a fraction of the time compared to using Shopify alone. Time to market is slashed in half!

Now Tuft + Paw has greater control over how customers interact with their store, which is critical as a multi-channel seller.

“We prioritize how we introduce new products to our existing customers,” says Jackson. “We have much more control over that end of the conversation with Shogun versus selling on Amazon, for example.”

Thanks to being able to customize Shopify without code, Tuft + Paw saved 100 hours of development time within the first three months of using Shogun.

“To build an initial page, it’ll take about a day and a half or so (setting up copy, images, data sets, etc.)…But when I’m creating variations of that page— tweaking the images or reordering things—it’s half an hour.”

With Shogun, Tuft + Paw has:

• Unlocked the flexibility of a drag-and-drop page editor to create custom ecommerce content without code
• The ability to duplicate pages instantly and iterate quickly to ensure consistency and efficiency
• An empowered team to continue shipping and optimizing the site as they see fit
• A visual builder that grows with them as they scale

The team can move faster, experiment often, and figure out what resonates most.

“For any Shopify brand looking for a landing page builder, I would definitely recommend Shogun. It’s really easy to use, allows you to customize quickly, and pulls your product catalog into the building experience directly, which is critical for saving time as a small team.”