Aid Station
- UX/UI Design,
- Conversion Rate Optimisation,
- Brand & Design Direction
Engagement rate from 60.7% to 79.2%
A growing catalogue is a good problem until it becomes a navigation one. Aid Station's range was expanding fast, and a shopper needed to find the right product without wading through everything around it. The Working Party built on Shopify 2.0 using a custom framework and flexible theme architecture rather than an off-the-shelf theme, which created the room to design for how athletes actually shop.
The visual direction is premium and editorial, with high-contrast layouts and a product hierarchy built for scanning. Navigation moved from a standard dropdown to a visual, product-led system that surfaces products at the point of browsing, alongside a dedicated Brands A–Z pathway for the brand-loyal shopper working through a catalogue that runs to more than 1,300 carbohydrate products alone. Reviews, live chat and an in-house accredited dietitian carry the trust load for first-time buyers, while The Aid publishes education to the same high standard as the rest of the online experience. In the eleven months following launch, bounce rate fell 47%, internal search queries rose 96.6%, and organic revenue grew 59.4%.
Aid Station converts at around 4.86%, the kind of rate normally reserved for low-consideration impulse categories. Endurance nutrition is the opposite: athletes research exhaustively before they commit. A site that converts like an impulse buy, for a purchase that never is, is doing something unusual.
Inventory architecture built around warehouse reality
On the storefront it looks simple: buy one, buy six, buy twelve. Underneath, it is one of the more demanding inventory problems in the build. Aid Station holds a single shared pool of stock, so a box of twelve isn't a fixed unit but twelve individual units that can be sold however they're wanted, whether that's as the full box, a pack of six, or singles. Standard Shopify inventory logic won't allow this, reserving inventory per format so that a pack of six can show as sold out while the singles to fill it sit in the warehouse, stranding both stock and cash. The Working Party built custom logic using meta objects to keep this fluid, so nothing is committed to a format until a customer buys it.
Curated bundles added a further layer. A Marathon Essentials pack holds several products, including some in multiples of the same item which Shopify's native bundling can't support, so the new logic handles this too. The impact? Stock that's always sellable and capital that's never idle — inside a store where add to cart rates rose 85%, completed checkout 59%, and items purchased 30.1%.
Heat maps, not hunches
Forty-five minutes is a long time to spend buying an energy gel, but it was the amount of time new customers were moving between collections and products before committing. We wanted to find out why, not through guesswork but through strategic observation.
As part of Aid Station’s growth framework, our strategy team ran a behavioural analysis across the full site using Microsoft Clarity. Every observation traced deliberately: what the heat map data showed, what customer need it implied, what pain point that need exposed and what could be built to resolve it. Strategy and UX design specialists worked in parallel throughout, so ideas were pressure-tested visually as they emerged rather than handed over as recommendations.
The analysis surfaced clear patterns. Engagement clustered on the nutritional information tab, because an endurance athlete isn’t shopping for flavour or packaging: they need thirty grams of carbohydrate and they need to keep it down. Each observation was translated into a defined customer need, a specific pain point, and a costed initiative, producing a prioritised, client-approved roadmap built entirely on recorded behaviour rather than assumption.
Services
Design and Creative
- UX/UI Design,
- Brand & Design Direction
Strategy and Optimisation
- Conversion Rate Optimisation
Partners
- Shopify
- Klaviyo
- Gorgias
- Nosto
