An outdoor brand
for wanderers

For an outdoor WordPress and Shopify ecommerce store, we first needed to establish a strong brand that represented the desires of the customers. So after doing a lot of research on ultra light hiking on places like Reddit and Instagram, we narrowed in on potential customers who are new to hiking and probably in their 20s.

We wanted Hiker Tan to feel like a cozy fireplace or the colors of Fall, but wanted to communicate a classical design aesthetic with traditional looking serifs and sans-serifs.

Since we were using a Shopify store integration, we mainly used AliExpress to source our outdoor products for the store.

One of the hardest parts of a dropship store from a design point-of-view is getting product images to feel like they aren’t from AliExpress.

A concept we wanted to test out was being able to create collections of products on the site that would come with an aggregated estimate of the weight of the total collection of products.

For the homepage we really wanted to tap into the aspirational dreams and goals of our audience. So we thought nothing better than sitting under the stars, on top of a mountain edge with an incredible view.

One of the questions we got a lot in the early development of Hiker Tan was validating if the products were good or not. Many people in the outdoor industry are loyal to certain brands.

So we felt that for every product we put into a collection, that we had actual hikers go out and report back if it was good or not. This made the ‘field test’ a major component to the product page.

Once we had a brand and operational store, we took to social media to get the awareness out. Some of our promotions lead to sales and views and others didn’t work as well.