Stio partnered with Anatta beginning in 2021 to raise the general standard of Stio’s digital customer experience. The partnership included improvements to site speed, the redesign of many core pages, and the launch of a circular eCommerce initiative to achieve zero waste.
Stio & Anatta
For the past several years, Stio has experienced consistent fast growth. When the pandemic struck in 2020, at first Stio (like most brands) didn’t know what to expect. How would the world—let alone Stio’s customers—respond to the crisis?
Stio identified the influx as an opportunity to invest more intentionally into their digital customer experience and customer journey.
Leadership from the modern menswear brand, Mack Weldon, referred Anatta to Stio as a prospective agency partner.
By the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021, Stio partnered with Anatta to help make the most out of its outsized traffic. They wanted to level up the core of their online presence through customer experience optimization.
“At Stio, we are always focused on the things that we believed are most core to our long-term strategic success. We've always built internal teams around product development, our digital brand experience, and across digital channels like direct mail, Facebook, Pinterest, you name it.”
Evan Torrance, Vice President of Marketing at Stio
“We've often outsourced the other key components of our experience to the best partner agencies that we could find. We tend to look for a full-service package that’s deeply focused on a particular vertical. We want to find agencies who work with us as partners. So there was a logical opportunity for us to bring in a full-service front-end digital agency to focus on the customer journey, on-site, mobile, desktop, right through to integration points into Shopify and NetSuite.”
“We want to find agencies who work with us as partners.”
Evan Torrance, Vice President of Marketing at Stio
Anatta was onboarded to the Stio team in the first quarter in 2021. Stio chose to work with two full-time Anatta resources, plus a part-time project manager. Anatta started with a standard audit of Stio’s full digital presence. This audit became the jumping-off point for the initial projects.
The goal of the earliest work was to bring Stio's website to a new base standard. The projects included updates, edits, and redesigns to improve the overall site and customer experience. For example, Anatta targeted many of the core web vitals that Google looks for in quality websites, including things such as page load speeds.
“Over the space of about two months, we were able to work through a long list of poor scrubs, poor coding, poor image sizes, all those sorts of things—to really improve our Google ranking.”
Evan Torrance, Vice President of Marketing at Stio
In addition to raising the standard of Stio’s online experience, Anatta took on a handful of related projects. This included PDP and PLP redesigns, a home page redesign, and templatizing many of Stio’s common digital processes.
By the second half of the year, Anatta was tasked with an assignment beyond the original roadmap. This project became one of their greatest shared successes during the partnership.
The project was to implement what’s called circular eCommerce. This initiative would ensure that Stio returns were efficiently put back into play. In other words: returned items could be resold to achieve zero waste.
Within six to eight weeks, Stio went from effectively having a no return-product catalog to over 200 returned products available to customers in their store.
“I think where a lot of agencies are only driven by what I call on-site metrics, Anatta has an ability to digest the broader business rationale.”
Evan Torrance, Vice President of Marketing at Stio
“Anatta has, in almost every respect, at the very least met our expectations or exceeded them.”
Evan Torrance, Vice President of Marketing at Stio
“Stio has been the best team to work with. Evan [Torrance] brought a lot of data from his side. Their team gets it and understands their brand inside and out.”
Nirav Sheth, Founder of Anatta
“I think in a fully-remote digital world like we've been in for the last few years, Anatta has been an even more natural extension of our team. Whether it's with our performance marketing people in Santa Cruz, California, or CX agents in Georgia, we're able to connect with Anatta as a team in a seamless way. And that's worked really well for us.”
“Anatta has been an even more natural extension of our team.”
Evan Torrance, Vice President of Marketing at Stio
“We found Anatta to be a professional, engaged, driven, and committed partner, who is as invested in our goals and outcomes as we are as a business. And we couldn't really ask for much more than that.”
“Anatta is a professional, engaged, driven, and committed partner.”
Evan Torrance, Vice President of Marketing at Stio
We found Anatta to be a professional, engaged, driven, and committed partner, who is as invested in our goals and outcomes as we are as a business. And we couldn't really ask for much more than that.
