For moms, there is just never enough time in the day. After having her first child, award-winning makeup artist and busy New York City mom Debra Rubin-Roberts realized she desperately needed to speed up her makeup routine. The solution? She developed a curated line of multitasking beauty products to simplify the busy woman's daily beauty routine.
Due to the pandemic, Mommy Makeup shut down its U.S.factories from March to July 2020. Director of eCommerce Jeremy Roberts said they were extra cautious about the team’s safety, so everything took longer once they began to ramp up. More than a year later, they’re still only operating at 75% production capacity.
That said, Mommy Makeup’s eCommerce had a year like never before, and the growth in online purchase activity was substantial, Jeremy said. “We pivoted into products that were mask-proof (also water-proof, kiss-proof) and also double downed on live makeup consultations,” he said.
As luck would have it, Mommy Makeup was self-fulfilling even pre-COVID. “Our relationships with FedEx and even USPS have afforded shipping opportunities, 6pm pickups, insanely great rates that we can pass on to our customers, and customer-service flexibility that a traditional 3PL could never give us,” Jeremy explained. Plus, he and his team can “build to order” sets and kits. “From a personal color consultation to expedited free shipping, we can offer a superior experience for our customers—who needs to go shopping in a store when you can get 99% of the in-store experience from home?”
Mommy Makeup used the three-month downtime to rebuild as much of their tech stack as they could — and they built out tools for better customer conversations. “We are not ‘just’ an online makeup brand — we are helping our customers find solutions that are customized for their needs,”Jeremy said. Jeremy and his team also went all-in with Re:Amaze software for help-desk/chat/FAQ—building out 1000+ macros for automated (bot) replies as well as human-assisted chats and conversations. “This is all connected to Messenger (Facebook and Instagram) as well as Klaviyo for email,” Jeremy said.
Mommy Makeup aims to make the online shopping experience easy and fast. To save their customers valuable time, Mommy Makeup uses short embedded tutorial videos and pop-ups to guide the customer quickly and efficiently to purchase what they need to speed up their beauty routine. Even pre-COVID, Mommy Makeup provided digital content. “Debra’s videos have a cult-like following,” Jeremy said. The brand also has robust email content.“Debra loves to talk about beauty and share her opinions and practical solutions,” he said. “That’s why the company was founded in the first place!
”The conundrum: Mommy Makeup found that the additional features that make the site easy to navigate slowed the page load time—causing cart abandonment and higher bounce rates.
Mommy Makeup set out to research plugins to speed up theirShopify website that would allow them to keep the customer-experience features that guide customers to products quickly.
After evaluating more complicated options requiring extensive configuration and ongoing calibration, Mommy Makeup found EdgemeshBusiness for Shopify. The Edgemesh AI engine takes care of the calibration and the setup is as easy as adding one line of code to the website or clicking to install the Shopify Plugin for Edgemesh. To save their customers valuable seconds when buying their products, Mommy Makeup signed up and installed Edgemesh for Shopify in just a few clicks and without the assistance of a web developer.
“What we love about Edgemesh is the same thing we love about our own products, it saves time, it saves money and you just set it and forget it” said Jeremy.
Edgemesh's AI-based engine got to work immediately, learning customer traffic patterns and began accelerating customer experiences automatically. By the day’s end, the average page load time across customers had decreased by more than 37%.
“The Shopify app ecosystem is incredibly powerful, yet, it gives a merchant the chance to build out a slow-as-molasses website,” Jeremy explained. "What you gain in simplicity to build, you lose in terms of dumbing down the tech stack with code-bloat that doesn’t make for a great customer-facing UX", he adds. There is only so much a merchant can do without massive structural changes. “Shopify gets us close, but even with the BEST developer talent, it’s still Shopify,” he said.
So when it comes to creating a better (faster)experience for the customer, it’s all about Edgemesh. “Edgemesh is a great solution for us because we’re not a 1-page lander/checkout now type of merchant,” Jeremy said. “Our customers sometimes spend 20-30 minutes on our site, watching videos, interacting with our makeup artists, and finding solutions,” he explained. Edgemesh rewards this kind of multi-page engagement with crazy-fast page loads, since Edgemesh is pre-caching the page the customer is going to visit. “I wonder why any merchant wouldn’t want this speed boost?”
Users accelerated by Edgemesh had a more than two times higher conversion rates than users who were not accelerated by Edgemesh.
Best of all, the Mommy Makeup team could analyze the impact directly inside their current tools, like Google Analytics, to see a side-by-side comparison of Edgemesh accelerated vs. non-accelerated users."
A successful eCommerce website is about staying up to date with the latest innovations and constantly fine-tuning the store to deliver a best in class experience for our customers. With Edgemesh, we've taken MommyMakeup.com from around 3 seconds to below 2 seconds, and we love saving our customers time!” said Jeremy.
