Cotopaxi

Personalization Innovator Award Winner

Cotopaxi is a sustainable outdoor apparel brand with a mission for fair fashion to move people to do good. It is recognized as a Personalization Innovator for its enhancement of product detail and listing pages through advanced recommendation strategies that tailormatch products based on type, features, user affinity, and more, as well as its testing of layouts, image options, product comparison modules and other helpful experiences, driving significant revenue uplift.
Awarded to organizations who have a complete grasp of experience optimization and push the limits of personalization to create real value for their customers and their businesses.
As a brand with a premium product at an elevated price point, it’s important for Cotopaxi to nurture visitors through the different stages of the buying process. Education and price justification are key factors for users who are just beginning to research product options. Personalization allows Cotopaxi to meet their website visitors where they are and create an experience that speaks to their needs at every point of the buyer journey.

How Cotopaxi Does It

Simplifies browsing for customers, curating complete look recommendation widgets on each product detail page (PDP) so that customers can visualize which items to pair together. As well as creating outfits that look great, Cotopaxi leverages user affinity profiles to make sure that the items recommended match the visitor's affinity to men’s or women’s clothing so that the product suggestions are relevant and more likely to drive engagement.

Maximizes PDP engagement by creating a landing-page style experience for key travel packs, their most popular products. Despite their popularity, customers can be particularly sensitive to the price of these packs, so Cotopaxi dedicates more page content to these products. In addition to the primary product section, the team added modules that highlight key product benefits, social proof, and videos of the products in action, driving conversion rates (particularly amongst mid and low-intent visitors). 

Makes it easier to understand the differences between their products, so that their customers can find the right product for them. Using Dynamic Yield and Shopify's product API, Cotopaxi pulls key information and imagery from each pack into a module for easy side-by-side comparisons between packs. As well as making the shopping experience easier for their customers, Cotopaxi saw a 12% increase in conversion rate following this helpful update.

What it looks like

Complete The Look
PDPs as landing pages
Product Comparison
PDP image layout

Complete The Look

Cotopaxi enhances the shopping experience by setting up three unique outfit curations on product pages. On the pack PDPs, they feature the pack the user is currently viewing, paired with a base layer such as a tee or long sleeve shirt, a fleece or insulated jacket layer, and a bottom piece, either shorts or pants. Leveraging Dynamic Yield’s recommendation engine , specific rules are set for each slot to ensure relevance and cohesion.

These apparel recommendations are further tailored based on user affinity. For users with a top three affinity to men's apparel, men's clothing options are displayed, and similarly, women's apparel is shown for those with a preference to women's items. This targeted approach has proven highly effective, resulting in a 13.67% increase in conversion rate, a 7.21% rise in average order value, and a 21.87% boost in revenue per visitor.

Landing page-style PDP for key travel packs

Cotopaxi’s key travel packs are popular, but user surveys indicated price as a friction point. To address this, the team designed several modules and tested their positioned above the primary product section with Dynamic Yield. These modules highlight the key features of the bag, incorporate user-generated content and reviews, and showcase the product in action with a walkthrough video that links the product to Cotopaxi’s overall mission and impact.

The layout tested well, with low and medium-intent audiences, resulting in an +8.11% increase in add- to- cart rate, a +16% conversion uplift, and a +15% increase in revenue per user.

Product comparison on pack PLPs

One of the challenges for Cotopaxi is educating users on product differences to reduce friction in the decision-making process. In this pack product listing page experience, Cotopaxi used Dynamic Yield and Shopify's product API to pull key information and imagery into a modal that allowed a user to easily compare products on several criteria.

Following this experience update, Cotopaxi saw a +6% lift in add-to-cart rate, a +12% lift in conversion rate, and an +8% lift in revenue per visitor.

Replacing color swatches with product images

In this test, Cotopaxi used Dynamic Yield and Shopify's product API to pull in the primary image for each color variant of a product, and used that to replace the original preview, which was a single-color swatch. This experience allowed a user to see a thumbnail of each color variant and more easily find their preferred hue.

This resulted in a significant increase in page views (+17.8%) and a notable increase in add-to-cart rate (of +5%).

What’s next?

As Cotopaxi looks to the future, its team wants to continue personalizing and creating different landing page-style experiences for users based on intent levels – this includes a ‘new to Cotopaxi’ page that they are excited to test.
Cotopaxi will also expand personalized experiences to as many touchpoints as possible beyond just the onsite experience. The team hopes to continue innovating and taking advantage of new capabilities and tools with Dynamic Yield, such as AdaptML, a centralized AI system powering its Experience OS, which includes VisualML, to identify and recommend visually similar products.

The team behind the experiences

Kirby CrookConversion Rate Optimization Associate Director

Kirby runs the CRO and personalization practice at Cotopaxi, where he builds and deploys tests, performs analyses, and leads brainstorms with the team to find solutions for customers' specific problems and points of friction. Having built out the personalization program at Cotopaxi, Kirby leads a cross-functional group dedicated to crafting data-driven user experiences through experimentation and personalization.

Stacey HoweVice President of eCommerce

Stacey Howe is the VP of eCommerce at Cotopaxi, where she spearheads digital strategy and oversees the development of the company's online presence. With a strong focus on innovation, Stacey leads a dedicated team to enhance customer experiences through seamless and efficient eCommerce solutions. Her leadership and advocacy for the personalization program drive Cotopaxi’s mission to deliver exceptional online shopping experiences.

Sarah KadlecekSenior UX/UI Designer

Sarah is a talented UX/UI designer with extensive experience in creating design systems, crafting intuitive user interfaces, and establishing UX practices from the ground up. She leads the design of experiments and personalization and collaborates with Kirby to deliver these experiences to Cotopaxi’s visitors through Dynamic Yield.