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Montana Knife Company
Montana Knife Company makes superior knives, most of them designed for hunting. All their knives are manufactured, built, assembled, finished and sharpened in the U.S., with every bit of material possible sourced from within the country as well. Co-owned by Master Bladesmith and MKC President Josh Smith and Vice President Brandon Horoho, MKC has an ambition to grow into one of the biggest and most respected American-made brands.
The business has already grown a ton since it started in 2020. They sell their products almost exclusively through their Shopify Online Store and have an uncommon supply constraint with their knives being out-of-stock most of the time due to high demand and limited supply. The company operates on a drop model, usually with one knife model being released each week on Thursday night at 7 p.m. Mountain Time.
MKC’s site was built on a Shopify 1.0 theme. In 2023, the company found it was time to upgrade to a Shopify Online Store 2.0 theme.
“We wanted to use that time and that transition to upgrade our entire overall website theme and UX. We wanted our website to be incredibly friction-free and extremely shoppable to pretty much make it as easy as possible to close the deal.”
“We also wanted to have that more premium feel to our products because we are a premium knife maker. We wanted to make sure we drove that home with the new website.”
One of the concerns they had was finding a reliable team who could handle the size of the project. MKC had 300-400 SKUs and nearly all of them had customized individual product pages. After listening to the Unofficial Shopify Podcast and seeing some of the websites we put together for our clients, Brandon says they knew our team would understand what they needed and would be able to accomplish what they were looking for. When we met with them, it confirmed we’d be the right fit.
“The biggest thing was the pre-call with the plan they laid out and them setting their own aggressive deadlines. We just knew they were going to get the job done. We looked at some other companies, but the other biggest thing was the fact that they’re Shopify specialists and Kurt has the number one Shopify podcast. We know he's always looking at every single Shopify update and upgrade they have, and I just always got the sense that we were just working with the most up-to-date information for our website. To the Shopify experts to get your Shopify site built, that seems like a no-brainer.”
Designing and developing a customized theme for MKC
We worked with MKC to design and develop a customized Shopify 2.0 theme to improve the shopping experience, reflect the high-end nature of their products, and help drive more sales.
For some companies, the site design needs to carry a heavier load to help make the product look great. But MKC had such a solid foundation with beautifully crafted products, great branding, and amazing photography. Our goal was to complement their outstanding content and create a cohesive experience, helping set the expectation for what their products feel like in the customer’s hands.
To give a bolder and higher-end feel with the design, we created color contrast throughout the site. We made the header a deep gray, contrasting it with white links and orange company logo. We color-blocked sections throughout the homepage, content pages, and product pages to make the site more visually interesting than if the entire page was white. We included details for polish like adding a thin white border to separate the black announcement bar from the gray header. The product detail pages (PDPs) have custom theme sections to call out some of the key features of the individual products (using some of MKC’s stellar product photography).
We made a number of improvements to create an easier shopping experience. We added collections for MKC’s knives that allow customers to filter and shop by pursuit type (e.g. bushcraft, big game, white tail, fin and feather, culinary). We made the navigation structure clear and more intuitive, making it easier to shop by the type of product a customer is looking for with better subcategories. We made in-stock products more visible by prominently featuring them in a section of the homepage directly below the header image.
We vastly improved how the site appears on mobile devices, designing it with a clean and easy-to-navigate mobile experience in mind. We also made shopping for a product variant a more seamless experience; previously MKC did not have variants listed on their PDPs.
“Now our product pages, you can go through each variant and the whole page swaps to that variant, making it more efficient and easier to find exactly what you're looking for. That was a huge upgrade for us.”
We also created additional prompts to have the customer enter their email address to receive product drop and back-in-stock notifications, including a big call-to-action button on the PDPs on out-of-stock products.
We kept apps to a minimum, building most of the functionality directly into the theme, which has resulted in faster load times. The few select apps that we recommended and implemented offer meaningful improvements for the business:
- We used Rebuy’s exceptional versatility to craft tailored cross-sell offers throughout the site to help increase revenue through higher order values.
- We used Shopify Search and Discovery to enable more efficient product filtering and enhance the browsing experience.
- We created automated workflows to bolster order risk management using Shopify Flow, helping to ensure smoother operations.
Metafields are a powerful tool available with Shopify Online Store 2.0 themes. They allow merchants to personalize product pages with extra data fields, giving customers a better shopping experience and increasing the store’s visibility on search engines. We set up every PDP with metafields (e.g. use type, available colors, product specs) to enable faceted catalog filtering for customers on the front end of the site and for staff managing the catalog on the back end, and also to enable the PDP content to be generated dynamically.
MKC appreciated how collaborative we were, how we worked quickly yet also accommodated delays they had on their side, as well as the support we provided in the 30 days after the early October site launch.
“When we did have an issue, they were on it right away. I’d send an email and it would be fixed within a couple hours. Just real great support all around.”
Throughout our work with MKC, we created screencasts to give them tips on using Online Store 2.0 features to help them self-service their site, which both Brandon and Mike found valuable in setting them up for success.
“They didn’t gate-keep information from us to make us need to rehire them as a consultant to make every little edit. They almost became coaches and helped us learn the theme, learn the build. They taught us everything we needed and we haven’t had to reach out to them to fix any bugs or add anything since the off-boarding.”
A site that drives more sales as the company continues to grow
MKC’s growth has exploded. After a big revenue spike in August 2023, November then became their biggest month.
“In November, we quadrupled our topline sales from our previous monthly averages. Even though a lot of that is due to some major hits — we had a big Joe Rogan shout out and started paid ads for the first time — the site definitely helped. Just having the more well-developed homepage with the in-stocks right up front and all the things they did with the navigation, the collection search, implementing the Rebuy app, and other things they added to our site, I think is incredibly helpful. It's all about cutting down that friction for the customer to find the knife, put it in their cart, get cross-sold, and check out.”
With high-revenue stores, one of the real game-changers is increasing the amount customers spend on their order. MKC’s cross-sell acceptance rates have seen notable improvement with the changes we’ve made to the site. In the 30-day post-launch period, 7.36% of orders included cross-sells powered by the Rebuy app, marking nearly a 10% increase in cross-sells for MKC.
Along with revenue, MKC is also seeing their email list grow substantially, potentially due to a combination of increased traffic to the site and the additional prompts we put on the site to sign up to be notified about future knife drops and product restocks.
Brandon says the company has also been receiving a lot of compliments about the site and that it inspires confidence with people who interact with their brand.
“People don’t expect a three-year-old knife company to have such a robust, well-developed, well-thought-through site, which I think obviously helps with customers, but also helps attract better partners and people that we collaborate with. Whenever a major Fortune 500 company is reaching out to us to do a collaboration, they can look at our site and see that we have our stuff together.”
Having metafields set up and the knowledge of how to work with them has also helped make updating the site easier and more efficient.
“In our old product pages, I’d have to go in and manually swap out every individual piece of content and now it’s kind of just plug and play with the metafields, which is a huge time-saver on my end. I also now know how to create my own metafields if we need to build new product pages.”
Both Mike and Brandon say they would recommend working with Ethercycle to others. MKC is already planning to work with us in the future as they grow further.
“I think they’re worth every penny with their level of professionalism, their ability to get things done and get them done quickly, and just pretty much always having the answers and being really good consultants in the shopping experience and how to convert sales. There’s no question the value was there.”
Our Work Together
Ethercycle helped Montana Knife Company:
- Design and develop a new theme that reduces friction in the shopping experience, better reflects their premium products, and inspires confidence with potential partners and collaborators.
- Increase revenue by increasing their cross-sell rate by nearly 10%.
- Create additional prompts for customers to share their email to help grow MKC’s email list.
- Save time and increase their ability to self-service their site through documentation and training on how to use Online Store 2.0 features.