Huckberry Website Case Study
Useful content that’s beautifully designed and well-written. Interesting products that are carefully selected for a targeted customer. Emotional branding that goes beyond product and speaks to a lifestyle. Slick, seamless digital experiences that guide consumers to purchase again, and again. Put it all together and you have Huckberry, a curated ecommerce retailer of men’s outdoor gear.
Huckberry defines itself as “an online shop and journal that inspires more active, adventurous, and stylish lives through members-only sales, original story-telling, and unique experiences.” (O’Neil 2018). With a potent, lifestyle-brand approach and a precision customer target, Huckberry is an ecommerce brand whose present and future looks bright.
So how do they do it? Let’s take a look how Huckberry uses a content marketing to drive traffic and web analytics to optimize their website’s user experience.
Content Drives Traffic
Founded in 2011 by Andy Forch and Richard Greiner, Huckberry's mission is based on a simple concept: Bring practical, stylish, outdoor gear to weekend warriors.
Today, Huckberry sells over 750,000 products annually and employs around 100 people, they have a headquarters in San Francisco and a service center in Columbus, Ohio (Peters, 2018). The brand’s success has also spurred a brief brick-and-mortar iteration, as they’ve opened a pop-up store in Manhattan’s West Village. The pop-up, open for just three months, aligns with their “inspirational” storytelling approach and offers items that align with trip itineraries (Wilson, 2018).
Co-founder Andy Forch says that the brand is all about “storytelling at heart.” (Partridge) In a 2015 podcast (Partridge) Forch described Huckberry as an online shop and magazine. Although the brand came into a crowded space just 7 years ago, it's this content-heavy strategy that's helped it quickly build notoriety and customer loyalty.
The operative word from Forch is magazine. The brand anchors much of its approach on creating magazine-style content that adds value to the customer while also selling products. In fact, one of the moves that Forch attributes to the brand’s success is a partnership with Outside Magazine, who they established an affiliate marketing agreement with in their earliest days. (Partridge) This partnership with Outside gave Huckberry access to their target audience and also earned media coverage at the same time, like in this feature about a product line carried on the site.
Speaking of targets, Huckberry knows theirs well. The persona they’re after is someone who lives in a city, but loves the outdoors and seeks an escape as a weekend warrior (Partridge). The same target is someone that geeks out over gear, and has a taste for cool, emerging brands, according to Forch (Partridge). It’s this weekend-warrior lifestyle target that’s anchoring Huckberry’s content strategy and powering their ecommerce growth.
The brand creates content features on their site that cater to an upscale, male adventurer target. With topics like road trips, travel to locations like Iceland, and a young captain on the Bering Sea, Huckberry uses their content to connect with their target.They feature this content across their social media channels like Instagram and Twitter, and also use it in their emails. Since the content is well-produced it makes for a naturally shareable, organically amplified generator for earned media.
Huckberry also partners with small, niche brands to drive traffic to their site. Products that may be relatively unknown to the masses, but that appeal to their target, have a home on Huckberry. These smaller brands offer up partnership and affiliate marketing opportunities to Huckberry.
“We’ve gotten very crafty and resourceful over the last six years with marketing,” said Huckberry Brand Management and Business Development Director Micah McKay in an interview (Peters). “We didn’t have a lot of money for advertising, so we got creative. In the first year, we partnered with The Art of Manliness and Outside to slowly grow our brand name.”
Huckberry’s approach to partnership, with parties like publishers, content marketers, outdoor enthusiasts, and brands, has resulted in two-way affiliate links and digital content that increases the brand’s presence online.
Destination: Huckberry.com
Of course, the goal of all that content is to drive Huckberry’s target customer to their site.
The site itself is designed in with an uncluttered, flat style. It has a large carousel at the top of the page, followed by a “trending” gear section, then branded tiles, recommendations, editor’s picks, and content from their “Journal” closing out the page.
When visitors hit their home landing page they are immediately greeted with a form to join Huckberry. Their form is simplified and low-pressure, a tactic designed to maximize conversions, and if you haven't logged in or joined, the form pops over on entry to many different pages.
This move is something the site owners do intentionally to get as many emails as possible and track user behavior, “We want to make people feel as if signing up is their choice, that it’s not forced. Our email CTAs are fresh and on-brand, not intrusive,” says McKay. (Peters)
The brand’s landing/product pages maintain the clean, flat design from their homepage. They use A/B testing of their design, colors, copy, and images (Peters). “We A/B test everything. Images, copy, layout, format, color… everything. It doesn’t matter if we’re designing a landing page for a product or a piece of content, we always ask: what grabs the user’s attention?” (Peters)
The clean, flat page design heavily emphasizes the product, making for an easy-to-understand customer experience on page, like with this recycled wool cap in the image below.
Now, I didn’t come across the wool cap on accident, it was a product that was in the “trending” section on the main landing page. By setting up their main landing page with these sections like "trending" or "editor's choice", Huckberry gives customers an experience that’s more like a content site than a shopping one. It's design trend that’s used by news sites or online magazines (Rocheleau, 2018) and in some ways it's even reminiscent of Netflix.
Through their page design, Huckberry reinforces the brand, provides information, and builds trust with customers. Some refer to this as the art and science of storytelling, an approach built on the idea that people don’t just buy products, they buy idealizations of themselves, and through story a brand can tap into that ideal (Compton, 2016).
This storytelling structure on Huckberry’s product pages not only helps people understand the product at a glance, but also builds a relationship between the customer and the brand. Huckberry’s copy writing style provides this story element. Then, by including a large section of the page focused on trust factors like customer support, a low-price guarantee, and free/easy returns, the brand can remove objections and lower the barriers to purchase.
“At Huckberry,” said McKay, “Our top priority is to build a relationship with folks over time through what we like to refer to as ‘real talk.’ Real talk is down-to-earth selling that feels very natural to the customer. It’s not invasive or intrusive at all. It’s real talk.” (Peters) It’s this focus on relationship that brings customers to Huckberry, but it’s good design structure that closes the deal.
Since Huckberry's first focus is on building relationships, both with loyal customers and product/publishing partners, they build a page design and optimize for SEO with that in mind.
Huckberry reviews data like cart abandonment and visitor page-view trends to decide which products to feature, tweak page design, and influence direct communication with customers. (Peters)
Side-by-Side Comparison
To see how Huckberry might be optimizing for SERP I conducted a search using the term recycled wool cap. Huckberry was the number 3 organic result on the first page, directly behind Patagonia (the maker of this hat).
For comparison, I skipped to page two of the search results and grabbed the top organic result, an ecommerce site for Massey Outfitters. The page design between Huckberry and Massey's was similar, both have the flat style with a focus on product, succinct copy and product comparisons at the bottom of the page.
So, I ran an SEO side-by-side comparison with this tool so I could identify a few differences.
The first difference you'll note is Huckberry’s URL. Both brands have the keyword in their URL, recycled wool cap, but Huckberry’s URL is in a shorter format, making it easier for search engines to find their product page (Backlinko, 2016).
The URLs:
Huckberry also uses H1 and H2 heading text with the keyword term. Massey uses “Patagonia” in addition to recycled wool cap and no H2 headings. While neither site is “overstuffing” headers or on-page keywords to the point that they’ll be penalized (Reed, 2018) it seems that little things like a short URL, H2 text, and a meta description are making a difference for Huckberry (Backlinko).
Final Thought
Huckberry is an interesting case study. They’ve taken the idea of lifestyle and content and wrapped into a nice ecommerce package that's generating brand loyalty and customer acquisition.
Their success has been the result of a powerful content engine that drives traffic. Through a content strategy that focuses on relatable, powerful storytelling, Huckberry generates a continually refreshed external links through earned media. These off-page links raise Huckberry's presence on the web and end up rewarding the brand's SERP.
Huckberry also pays attention to the details and learns from their customers' behavior. By capturing user data through forms and shareable content they stay close to their customers' needs, and attempt to deliver more of what those customers want. By designing web pages that guide the customer's journey they make the purchase process simple. And by following SEO guidelines like short URL’s, effective keyword use, and meta tagging of content, they’re helping search engines and customers find their site.
Huckberry's a brand to watch. They're niche customer, city-dwelling, male, weekend warriors, are affluent and can be very loyal once they see value in a brand. The connection that Huckberry is making through their lifestyle branding approach is obviously gaining momentum. If Huckberry continues to learn from customer feedback and web analytics, they'll only grow stronger and carve out a solid place in the outdoor retailers of the world.
References
72 Hours in Iceland (n.d.). [webpage]. Retrieved from https://huckberry.com/journal/posts/72-hours-in-iceland
Backlinko (2016). On page SEO checklist. Retrieved from: http://backlinko.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/On_Page_SEO_Checklist_Backlinko.pdf.
Compton, J. (2016, July 7). How Huckberry perfected ecommerce product page design (and every tip & tool you need to do the same). Blue Stout. [blog]. Retrieved on November 18, 2018 from https://bluestout.com/blog/ecommerce-product-page-design-optimization-huckberry/
Malachosky, E. (2018, November 1). Inside Huckberry’s NYC pop-up shop. Coolhunting.com. Retrieved on November 17, 2018 from https://coolhunting.com/style/huckberry-nyc-pop-up/
O’Neil, S. (2018, March 21). Tall tales: 3 online men’s retailers using lifestyle content to engage customers. Skyword. Retrieved on November 15, 2018 from https://www.skyword.com/contentstandard/creativity/tall-tales-3-online-mens-retailers-using-lifestyle-content-to-engage-customers/
Google (2018, November 17). [webpage]. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/search?q=patagonia+recycled+wool+cap&safe=active&rlz=1C1XYJR_enUS763US763&ei=NtXyW9KABczIsQXtrKuYCg&start=10&sa=N&ved=0ahUKEwjS8-Gu4eDeAhVMZKwKHW3WCqM4FBDy0wMI8AI&biw=1278&bih=598
Huckberry Home Page (n.d). [webpage]. Retrieved from https://huckberry.com/
Internet Marketing Ninjas (2018, November 17). [webpage]. Retrieved on November 17, 2018 from https://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/seo-compare/
Partridge, D. (2015). How to build a multi-million dollar outdoor brand with the founder of Huckberry. Startup Camp. [podcast]. Retrieved on November 17, 2018 from https://startupcamp.com/podcast/build-multi-million-dollar-outdoor-brand-founder-huckberry/
Peters, B. (November 2, 2018). How Huckberry went from $10,000 to $1,000,000 revenue in one year. Sumo. Retrieved on November 15, 2018 from https://sumo.com/stories/huckberry-case-study?utm_campaign=Submission&utm_medium=Community&utm_source=GrowthHackers.com
Reed School of Media (2018). Week 6 Lesson: SEO – On-page Optimization. West Virginia University. Retrieved on November 14, 2018 from https://ecampus.wvu.edu/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?course_id=_108046_1&content_id=_5188140_1&framesetWrapped=true
Rocheleau, J. (2018, February 21). Top web navigation trends. Creativebloq. Retrieved on November 17, 2018 from https://www.creativebloq.com/features/10-website-navigation-trends-for-2017
Wilson, M. (2018, October 16). Online menswear retailer jumps into physical retail. Chain Store Age. Retrieved on November 16, 2018 from https://www.chainstoreage.com/store-spaces/online-menswear-retailer-jumps-into-physical-retailer/
 |
| (Huckberry Home, n.d.) |
Huckberry defines itself as “an online shop and journal that inspires more active, adventurous, and stylish lives through members-only sales, original story-telling, and unique experiences.” (O’Neil 2018). With a potent, lifestyle-brand approach and a precision customer target, Huckberry is an ecommerce brand whose present and future looks bright.
So how do they do it? Let’s take a look how Huckberry uses a content marketing to drive traffic and web analytics to optimize their website’s user experience.
Content Drives Traffic
Founded in 2011 by Andy Forch and Richard Greiner, Huckberry's mission is based on a simple concept: Bring practical, stylish, outdoor gear to weekend warriors.
Today, Huckberry sells over 750,000 products annually and employs around 100 people, they have a headquarters in San Francisco and a service center in Columbus, Ohio (Peters, 2018). The brand’s success has also spurred a brief brick-and-mortar iteration, as they’ve opened a pop-up store in Manhattan’s West Village. The pop-up, open for just three months, aligns with their “inspirational” storytelling approach and offers items that align with trip itineraries (Wilson, 2018).
Co-founder Andy Forch says that the brand is all about “storytelling at heart.” (Partridge) In a 2015 podcast (Partridge) Forch described Huckberry as an online shop and magazine. Although the brand came into a crowded space just 7 years ago, it's this content-heavy strategy that's helped it quickly build notoriety and customer loyalty.
 |
| (72 Hours, n.d.) |
The operative word from Forch is magazine. The brand anchors much of its approach on creating magazine-style content that adds value to the customer while also selling products. In fact, one of the moves that Forch attributes to the brand’s success is a partnership with Outside Magazine, who they established an affiliate marketing agreement with in their earliest days. (Partridge) This partnership with Outside gave Huckberry access to their target audience and also earned media coverage at the same time, like in this feature about a product line carried on the site.
The earned coverage that Huckberry receives from Outside is ongoing. It's a strategy that's paid off as the brand can then also retarget to customers when they land on articles about them (note the retargeting advertisement from Huckberry in the lower right corner of the article below).
Speaking of targets, Huckberry knows theirs well. The persona they’re after is someone who lives in a city, but loves the outdoors and seeks an escape as a weekend warrior (Partridge). The same target is someone that geeks out over gear, and has a taste for cool, emerging brands, according to Forch (Partridge). It’s this weekend-warrior lifestyle target that’s anchoring Huckberry’s content strategy and powering their ecommerce growth.
The brand creates content features on their site that cater to an upscale, male adventurer target. With topics like road trips, travel to locations like Iceland, and a young captain on the Bering Sea, Huckberry uses their content to connect with their target.They feature this content across their social media channels like Instagram and Twitter, and also use it in their emails. Since the content is well-produced it makes for a naturally shareable, organically amplified generator for earned media.
Huckberry also partners with small, niche brands to drive traffic to their site. Products that may be relatively unknown to the masses, but that appeal to their target, have a home on Huckberry. These smaller brands offer up partnership and affiliate marketing opportunities to Huckberry.
“We’ve gotten very crafty and resourceful over the last six years with marketing,” said Huckberry Brand Management and Business Development Director Micah McKay in an interview (Peters). “We didn’t have a lot of money for advertising, so we got creative. In the first year, we partnered with The Art of Manliness and Outside to slowly grow our brand name.”
Huckberry’s approach to partnership, with parties like publishers, content marketers, outdoor enthusiasts, and brands, has resulted in two-way affiliate links and digital content that increases the brand’s presence online.
Destination: Huckberry.com
Of course, the goal of all that content is to drive Huckberry’s target customer to their site.
The site itself is designed in with an uncluttered, flat style. It has a large carousel at the top of the page, followed by a “trending” gear section, then branded tiles, recommendations, editor’s picks, and content from their “Journal” closing out the page.
When visitors hit their home landing page they are immediately greeted with a form to join Huckberry. Their form is simplified and low-pressure, a tactic designed to maximize conversions, and if you haven't logged in or joined, the form pops over on entry to many different pages.
 |
| Huckberry |
This move is something the site owners do intentionally to get as many emails as possible and track user behavior, “We want to make people feel as if signing up is their choice, that it’s not forced. Our email CTAs are fresh and on-brand, not intrusive,” says McKay. (Peters)
The brand’s landing/product pages maintain the clean, flat design from their homepage. They use A/B testing of their design, colors, copy, and images (Peters). “We A/B test everything. Images, copy, layout, format, color… everything. It doesn’t matter if we’re designing a landing page for a product or a piece of content, we always ask: what grabs the user’s attention?” (Peters)
The clean, flat page design heavily emphasizes the product, making for an easy-to-understand customer experience on page, like with this recycled wool cap in the image below.
 |
| Huckberry |
Now, I didn’t come across the wool cap on accident, it was a product that was in the “trending” section on the main landing page. By setting up their main landing page with these sections like "trending" or "editor's choice", Huckberry gives customers an experience that’s more like a content site than a shopping one. It's design trend that’s used by news sites or online magazines (Rocheleau, 2018) and in some ways it's even reminiscent of Netflix.
 |
| Huckberry |
Through their page design, Huckberry reinforces the brand, provides information, and builds trust with customers. Some refer to this as the art and science of storytelling, an approach built on the idea that people don’t just buy products, they buy idealizations of themselves, and through story a brand can tap into that ideal (Compton, 2016).
This storytelling structure on Huckberry’s product pages not only helps people understand the product at a glance, but also builds a relationship between the customer and the brand. Huckberry’s copy writing style provides this story element. Then, by including a large section of the page focused on trust factors like customer support, a low-price guarantee, and free/easy returns, the brand can remove objections and lower the barriers to purchase.
“At Huckberry,” said McKay, “Our top priority is to build a relationship with folks over time through what we like to refer to as ‘real talk.’ Real talk is down-to-earth selling that feels very natural to the customer. It’s not invasive or intrusive at all. It’s real talk.” (Peters) It’s this focus on relationship that brings customers to Huckberry, but it’s good design structure that closes the deal.
Since Huckberry's first focus is on building relationships, both with loyal customers and product/publishing partners, they build a page design and optimize for SEO with that in mind.
Huckberry reviews data like cart abandonment and visitor page-view trends to decide which products to feature, tweak page design, and influence direct communication with customers. (Peters)
Side-by-Side Comparison
To see how Huckberry might be optimizing for SERP I conducted a search using the term recycled wool cap. Huckberry was the number 3 organic result on the first page, directly behind Patagonia (the maker of this hat).
 |
| (Google, 2018) |
For comparison, I skipped to page two of the search results and grabbed the top organic result, an ecommerce site for Massey Outfitters. The page design between Huckberry and Massey's was similar, both have the flat style with a focus on product, succinct copy and product comparisons at the bottom of the page.
So, I ran an SEO side-by-side comparison with this tool so I could identify a few differences.
 |
| (Internet Ninjas, 2018) |
The first difference you'll note is Huckberry’s URL. Both brands have the keyword in their URL, recycled wool cap, but Huckberry’s URL is in a shorter format, making it easier for search engines to find their product page (Backlinko, 2016).
The URLs:
- Huckberry URL: https://huckberry.com/store/patagonia/category/p/53221-recycled-wool-cap
- Massey URL: https://www.masseysoutfitters.com/collections/hats/products/10063256-patagonia-recycled-wool-cap?variant=12438311960654
Huckberry also uses H1 and H2 heading text with the keyword term. Massey uses “Patagonia” in addition to recycled wool cap and no H2 headings. While neither site is “overstuffing” headers or on-page keywords to the point that they’ll be penalized (Reed, 2018) it seems that little things like a short URL, H2 text, and a meta description are making a difference for Huckberry (Backlinko).
Final Thought
Huckberry is an interesting case study. They’ve taken the idea of lifestyle and content and wrapped into a nice ecommerce package that's generating brand loyalty and customer acquisition.
Their success has been the result of a powerful content engine that drives traffic. Through a content strategy that focuses on relatable, powerful storytelling, Huckberry generates a continually refreshed external links through earned media. These off-page links raise Huckberry's presence on the web and end up rewarding the brand's SERP.
Huckberry also pays attention to the details and learns from their customers' behavior. By capturing user data through forms and shareable content they stay close to their customers' needs, and attempt to deliver more of what those customers want. By designing web pages that guide the customer's journey they make the purchase process simple. And by following SEO guidelines like short URL’s, effective keyword use, and meta tagging of content, they’re helping search engines and customers find their site.
Huckberry's a brand to watch. They're niche customer, city-dwelling, male, weekend warriors, are affluent and can be very loyal once they see value in a brand. The connection that Huckberry is making through their lifestyle branding approach is obviously gaining momentum. If Huckberry continues to learn from customer feedback and web analytics, they'll only grow stronger and carve out a solid place in the outdoor retailers of the world.
References
72 Hours in Iceland (n.d.). [webpage]. Retrieved from https://huckberry.com/journal/posts/72-hours-in-iceland
Backlinko (2016). On page SEO checklist. Retrieved from: http://backlinko.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/On_Page_SEO_Checklist_Backlinko.pdf.
Compton, J. (2016, July 7). How Huckberry perfected ecommerce product page design (and every tip & tool you need to do the same). Blue Stout. [blog]. Retrieved on November 18, 2018 from https://bluestout.com/blog/ecommerce-product-page-design-optimization-huckberry/
Malachosky, E. (2018, November 1). Inside Huckberry’s NYC pop-up shop. Coolhunting.com. Retrieved on November 17, 2018 from https://coolhunting.com/style/huckberry-nyc-pop-up/
O’Neil, S. (2018, March 21). Tall tales: 3 online men’s retailers using lifestyle content to engage customers. Skyword. Retrieved on November 15, 2018 from https://www.skyword.com/contentstandard/creativity/tall-tales-3-online-mens-retailers-using-lifestyle-content-to-engage-customers/
Google (2018, November 17). [webpage]. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/search?q=patagonia+recycled+wool+cap&safe=active&rlz=1C1XYJR_enUS763US763&ei=NtXyW9KABczIsQXtrKuYCg&start=10&sa=N&ved=0ahUKEwjS8-Gu4eDeAhVMZKwKHW3WCqM4FBDy0wMI8AI&biw=1278&bih=598
Huckberry Home Page (n.d). [webpage]. Retrieved from https://huckberry.com/
Internet Marketing Ninjas (2018, November 17). [webpage]. Retrieved on November 17, 2018 from https://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/seo-compare/
Partridge, D. (2015). How to build a multi-million dollar outdoor brand with the founder of Huckberry. Startup Camp. [podcast]. Retrieved on November 17, 2018 from https://startupcamp.com/podcast/build-multi-million-dollar-outdoor-brand-founder-huckberry/
Peters, B. (November 2, 2018). How Huckberry went from $10,000 to $1,000,000 revenue in one year. Sumo. Retrieved on November 15, 2018 from https://sumo.com/stories/huckberry-case-study?utm_campaign=Submission&utm_medium=Community&utm_source=GrowthHackers.com
Reed School of Media (2018). Week 6 Lesson: SEO – On-page Optimization. West Virginia University. Retrieved on November 14, 2018 from https://ecampus.wvu.edu/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?course_id=_108046_1&content_id=_5188140_1&framesetWrapped=true
Rocheleau, J. (2018, February 21). Top web navigation trends. Creativebloq. Retrieved on November 17, 2018 from https://www.creativebloq.com/features/10-website-navigation-trends-for-2017
Wilson, M. (2018, October 16). Online menswear retailer jumps into physical retail. Chain Store Age. Retrieved on November 16, 2018 from https://www.chainstoreage.com/store-spaces/online-menswear-retailer-jumps-into-physical-retailer/
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