Their Story:
The Tye-Dyed Iguana is owned and operated by Matt and Stephanie Smallheer. The business was started in November 2005, with the desire to teach others how to care for these species that co-exist with humans, as many fail to understand the lack of care and abuse that many reptiles receive daily. The community needed an establishment that not only retails reptiles to the public, but that offers an invaluable education. As a result, The Tye-Dyed Iguana was born.
Since inception, Tye-Dyed Iguana has undergone many changes. The store first opened in 2006 as a small 1,700 square foot facility, which allowed an initial inventory of about 30 species of animals plus dry goods. This space, however, was quickly outgrown, and within the first year of business, Tye-Dyed Iguana doubled its operational size to a little over 3,500 square feet, allowing for 50-60 different varieties of reptile, amphibian, and arachnid. In mid 2008 the store doubled once again, this time to 7,000 square feet. The additional 3,500 square feet provided Tye-Dyed Iguana with the necessary room for breeding, storage, administrative space, and our new on-location party room.
In July of 2012, the store diversified into high-end horticulture equipment. A separate storefront was opened under the name “Indoor Cultivator”. This endeavor stemmed from the design of living vivariums in the store. This addition added another 2,500 square feet of retail space to the operation for Indoor Cultivator. The addition of this product line truly made Tye-Dyed Iguana / Indoor Cultivator your one stop specialty stop. In 2016, 40 Freshwater Fish tanks were added along with a full line of Freshwater Fish supplies.
At the dawn of 2018, the company diversified their educational services to include a summer camp, birthday parties, school shows, and boy scout merit badge counseling. The educational services provided aim at teaching people of all ages about the beauty of reptiles. Their highly qualified staff provide services as simple as an in-store demonstration or out-of-store exhibits with local organizations. With Tye-Dyed Iguana, the possibilities are limitless.
The Challenge:
Tye-Dyed Iguana understands the importance that e-commerce has in today’s society and was looking to invest in a custom redesign of their website on the BigCommerce platform as a way to address part of the company’s overall strategy, including: improving site performance and user experience, especially the mobile experience; improving conversions; and increasing sales. As part of the redesign, TheTyeDyedIguana.com wanted to make sure there was a focus on the natural world, to demonstrate their commitment to safe and ethical interactions with the natural world. With this in mind, IntuitSolutions set out to create the new website.
The Solution: A Custom BigCommerce Design
To accomplish this goal, we first started with the IntuitSolution Base theme, which comes with a number of enhancements out-of-the-box to help with site performance. Next we worked on incorporating nature into the theme by adding elements like an improved iguana logo, grass-like elements on the footer, and leaves on the homepage. We also made sure to use green, yellow, and white as the main colors in the theme, so as to elicit a more-natural feeling. Along with a natural-focused design, we made sure to make the blog more prominent, as the team at TheTyeDyedIguana.com works hard to provide important information on various species and habitats.
Lastly, we created custom static pages for the store’s “Our Staff” and “Meet the Party Animals” pages to highlight the important team members. The custom pages incorporate a card-style grid design which allows customers to get to know the staff and the “party” animals in a clean, easy-to-digest way. This is in contrast to the prior view which mimicked a typical table you might see in an excel spreadsheet, due to the limitations of what can be done without the help of developers like the team at IntuitSolutions.
IntuitSolutions’ Base Theme
We build all of our custom BigCommerce stores with our proprietary “Base Theme”. This theme was developed off of the BigCommerce Cornerstone theme and enhanced by our BigCommerce developers to achieve improved page load speed, Google Core Web Vitals, and SEO results. The IntuitSolutions Base Theme comes out of the box with the following features:
- Significant Upgrades to ADA & WCAG Accessibility
- Better 404 Crawler Instructions
- Improved ‘Quick Search’ results
- Resolved Native Bugs
- Improved Blog layout
- Photoswipe Product Image Viewer
- Popup Login
- Product Data Page Custom Tabs
- Image Swap on hover
- Mega Menu
- Improve Cart Page Layout
- Additional Page Builder Region Points
- Slide Out Preview Cart
- Slide Out Search
- Brand Carousel
- And Much More
ThemeBridge™: The Staging-Like Environment Built for BigCommerce
ThemeBridge™ is an app developed by IntuitSolutions to help expedite the testing and launch processes. It allows us to preview any Stencil theme against your website’s real store data.
Every BigCommerce development project and retainer gains access to ThemeBridge™ at IntuitSolutions.
TheTyeDyedIguana.com was able to preview their new theme with their actual product data and content, browse the new site prior to launch, and see development progress in real-time – a process that no other development agency can offer. ThemeBridge™ ensures a smooth transition from Blueprint to Stencil and provides confidence for both our clients and our developers in knowing how a website will look and function prior to launch.
The Results:
TheTyeDyedIguana launched their new website in May, 2021. With the help of Stencil, our team of BigCommerce Development experts, and a beautifully redesigned website, TheTyeDyedIguana is now equipped with an e-commerce storefront that loads fast, is optimized for mobile devices, and provides a more modern user experience; the combination of which should assist the team in growing their business, especially their online sales, which tends to lead to increased brick and mortar sales as well. With a boost in sales a new website typically provides, TheTyeDyedIguana may need to look for a bigger storefront yet again.
Is your BigCommerce store design doing your business justice? We’re an Elite BigCommerce Partner and work exclusively on the BigCommerce platform. Shoot us a message or give us a call, 866 901 4650, to discuss how we can help your business succeed online.