From 2009 to 2022 Four Waves delivered all creative work, strategy and marketing for Erilan to see this health-oriented fashion store go from humble startup to successful 7-figure brand and eventual acquisition. Discover the amazing heartwarming story behind this Shopify-based brand below.
In 2006, Jill Tucker, owner of Erilan, was diagnosed with breast cancer, requiring a mastectomy and ongoing cancer treatment. Based in a regional Australian town, Jill was frustrated with the lack of access to the clothing and accessories mastectomy and cancer patients faced, often having to drive several hours to obtain products.
Following a successful recoverY, Jill knew something could be done to help other people like her. So she picked up the phone and called her son in the UK and called me - Dylan, the owner of Four Waves and asked ‘do you think you build me an online store?’
It’s important to first add some background here; this was 2009 and e-commerce in Australia was still very much in its infancy, particularly in regional Australia. But after some initial discussions it was decided that the brand had huge potential for successful and in helping people, and initial branding was carried out.
Erilan’s first few years were spent as a custom built ecommerce store on the self hosted Magento platform, and success was gradually building. But it was at this time we came across Shopify - then a small indie start up with the USP of being cloud-hosted - and after an initial trial period we became early adopters. Now Shopify is the world’s leading ecommerce platform, but at the time this allowed us to cut out teeth on the platform from an early stage; we would subsequently become Wales’ first official ‘Shopify Partner’ and received recognition throughout the years from Shopify themselves for Erilan’s success.
A clearly defined plan to make shopping for customers in what could be a difficult time easy resulted in an extremely loyal customer base; 33% of all purchases being repeat purchases. This was achieved through a variety of helpful shopping features, help & advice articles and an incentivised review system.
Fully integrated with email marketing platforms (initially Klaviyo and later Omnisend) using smart automations.
This allowed for regular emails to be sent out based on customer orders, size preferences, seasonal product lifespans and much more for increased conversions, better customer handholding and more efficient use of staff time.
Heavily customised and optimised theme to allow for high speed scores and search engine optimisation.
Sophisticated search and filtering facilities to make shopping simple within thousands of products. Rule based automation in the backup helped foolproof this otherwise time-consuming process and reduce admin hours.
Additional product information and badges helps customers choose the right product plus increase conversions and AOV (average order value). This includes USP product icons and 'bestseller' and 'new' badges.
Instead of Shopify's default product recommendation feature, we opted for a customised system to recommend upsell and cross-sell products based on meta field content, greatly increasing user journey efficiency and AOV.
High customer engagement rate thanks to carefully designed user experience (UX) flows and simple search features with regular testing. Average user session of 4.6 pages or 01:37.
Multi-geo setup with a New Zealand & Australian native store with location specific content
Full POS & phone ordering integration
Advanced integration with PPC such as Google Adwords and a variety of reporting, monitoring testing platforms.
Due it’s growing success and inspiration story, Erilan has featured heavily throughout the press, appearing on a range of news programs and in several publications. It’s won several awards and accolades including being classed as a ‘regional online hero’ by the Regional Australia Institute and being recognised by the Australian Business Chambers where Jill was asked to speak at their annual summit at Parliament House.
In addition to this, Erilan was chosen to be featured by Google for an international video ad campaign, and a team made up of crew members from Canada, the USA, Australia & Japan created the following campaign telling Jill’s story featured on this page.
While the brand was going from strength to strength Jill sold the business to enjoy retirement, undergoing a lengthy acquisition process with a range of interested parties from within Australia and overseas. During this time Four Waves exited the arrangement, satisfied with what we were able to help achieve; pioneering an online fashion brand to become the success that it now is and creating many firsts along the way. We wish the new owners continued success for the future.
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