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DTC Lessons: Shopify for planet-friendly brands with Noughts & Ones

Each week, we're chatting to an expert in the eCommerce space to share their wisdom on building a resilient DTC brand in 2022 and beyond.

This week we're handing the mic to Tom Locke, Founder of Noughts & Ones. Noughts & Ones are a Shopify agency specialising in building planet-friendly brands with development & design expertise.


Take it away Tom...

Interview with Tom Locke, Noughts & Ones

Let us know your role and what you do day to day

I run an eCommerce agency called Noughts & Ones. We make sales-friendly Shopify stores for planet-friendly businesses. 

Which area should DTC brands be focusing their time and efforts towards right now? 

With customers being much more rigorous right now about who they’re spending their money with, it's vitally important for DTC brands to focus their time and efforts on ensuring that their value proposition and brand values are front and centre. Making that buying decision as compelling and easy as possible for the current climate is crucial, particularly for the type of sustainable, planet-conscious brands that we partner with. 

For those brands with ethical, planet-conscious values, it’s incredibly important that they shout them loud and back them up with evidence. Greenwashing is such an issue right now that slapping some form of eco statement on your store is no longer enough. Lie or exaggerate and savvy customers will know. 

At Noughts & Ones, you specialise in Shopify design, build and strategy - what piece of advice would you give to DTC brands who want to improve? 

Focus on growing your customer lifetime value. We’ve done a lot of work this year on subscription portals with loyalty integrations as well as real-world customer impact tracking to maximise the value spend of subscription customers and keep them subscribed for longer! As well as offering an easy way for customers to set up a recurring order through a subscription builder flow like fussy or PACK’D a tailored and personalised subscription management experience is key to growing your monthly subscription revenue. Research shows that repeat customers tend to spend, on average, up to 33% more too. 

What are the top 3 brands you’ve seen executing these strategies? 

What are the biggest trends you’re seeing right now in sustainable eCommerce? 

With the continuing rise of conscious consumerism, we believe that eCommerce brands need to focus on more than just their own planet-conscious credentials. A growing number of consumers expect brands to not only focus on their own environmental impact, but demonstrate that they also care about the impact of those that they do business with. We call this a brand’s “Conscious Network”. 

If you could tell DTC brands to stop making one mistake, what would it be? 

Stop overcomplicating your user journey. Work on streamlining the checkout process to make it as easy as possible for customers to land on your store, find and then buy what they want. Additional costs such as shipping which appear after a customer has put their card details in are a really common reason for cart abandonment so make sure that everything is really clear upfront at the start of the check out process to avoid losing customers at the last moment. 

Complete the sentence: DTC brands that survive and thrive in 2023 will ____.

Leverage their conscious network (those they do business with and for) to ensure they profit with purpose. 

Who are 3 people in the eCommerce ecosystem you look up to and recommend everyone should follow? 

We were recently at the Blue Earth Summit and met so many inspirational people including a lot of planet-friendly eCommerce brand owners so picking three is hard. 

I’d say Rob and Guy (and the rest of the team) from Presca Sportswear have to be on that list. They combine a thriving community with circular ecommerce - a really forward thinking company that is constantly striving to do things in the right way. 

Zoe Rowswell and Kate Walmsley have just launched an incredible platform called Tern Eco to help eCommerce brands deliver a more circular ecommerce experience for their customers. Emmanuel Eribo and the team at LØCI are making serious waves in eCommerce at the moment - their journey has been amazing to follow so far! 

ME! A bit cheeky, and I know you asked for three, but why not…

Thanks Tom! Where can we find out more about Noughts & Ones?

Hit up our website to learn more about what we do and get in touch!

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