Apparel & footwear DTC
Size, fit and fabric data belong in metafields so they can be filtered, compared and reused across every product and every size guide.
Columbus, OH · Midwest
Shopify for Columbus Apparel, Footwear and Beauty Brands
Columbus has more apparel merchandising talent per square mile than almost anywhere in America, and most of it works for four large retailers. We build the independent brands the same tooling.
We work with Columbus brands remotely — no local storefront, just the same senior team on your timezone.
The market
What selling online in Columbus actually looks like
Columbus is a retail headquarters town, which is unusual and enormously useful. Abercrombie & Fitch sits on its own campus in New Albany, Victoria's Secret & Co out at Reynoldsburg on the east side, and Bath & Body Works and Designer Brands inside Columbus itself, and around them is the ecosystem those anchors created: technical designers, sourcing and production people, planners and allocators, fragrance and candle fillers, packaging suppliers, sample rooms and photo studios. An independent brand starting here can hire someone who has run a real season with real markdown pressure, which is a genuine advantage over almost every other mid-sized metro.
The logistics and demand picture reinforces it. Rickenbacker is a cargo-first airport and inland port built largely around apparel freight, and roughly half the US population sits within a one-day truck drive, which is why so much fulfilment capacity concentrates in this region. Ohio State — one of the largest single campuses in the country — sets an unmissable August and football-season demand curve for merchandise, fitness and home goods. Strength equipment is a real local category too, with a major manufacturer here and the Arnold Sports Festival bringing the trade to town every March. Independent retail lives in the Short North and German Village; the money and the new-build suburbs live in Dublin, New Albany and Easton.
All services · Columbus
How we help Columbus brands sell more
Each page covers how we run that service specifically for Columbus brands — the local context, the constraints, and what we deliver.
Design & Build in Columbus
Custom Shopify and Shopify Plus storefronts designed around your catalogue, built in clean Liquid, and launched with a measured conversion baseline.
Plus & Headless in Columbus
Plus-tier engineering for brands that have outgrown a standard theme: checkout extensions, Shopify Functions, B2B, Markets and headless Hydrogen storefronts.
Migrate to Shopify in Columbus
Move to Shopify with your catalogue, customers, order history and organic traffic intact. Redirect parity is signed off before we touch DNS.
Conversion Optimisation in Columbus
A continuous experimentation programme on your Shopify store: research, hypotheses, prioritised tests and every result reported in full, losers included.
eCommerce SEO in Columbus
Technical and content SEO built for Shopify catalogues, plus generative engine optimisation so your products surface inside AI answers.
Google Ads in Columbus
Google Ads for Shopify catalogues: Merchant Center feed health, Shopping and Performance Max structure, brand and non-brand separated, and weekly query mining.
Meta Ads in Columbus
Facebook and Instagram for Shopify brands: Advantage+ and catalogue campaigns, Conversions API signal repair, a creative cadence that outruns fatigue, and geo holdouts to check the claim.
Marketplace Channel in Columbus
Amazon, TikTok Shop and Walmart run as a discovery channel that feeds your Shopify store, with listings, PPC and margin managed together.
Klaviyo Email & SMS in Columbus
Klaviyo built as a retention system: behavioural flows, RFM segmentation, SMS used sparingly, and owned channels pushed toward 25-40% of total revenue.
Creative & Content in Columbus
Static, video and UGC creative produced on a monthly testing calendar, plus the product photography and page content your store and ads run on.
Analytics & Data in Columbus
GA4, server-side tracking, Conversions API and consent mode implemented properly, plus reporting that ties every channel back to contribution margin.
Apps & Support in Columbus
A named Shopify developer and strategist on a fixed sprint cadence: app stack owned, theme kept clean, ranked backlog shipped every month. The first stabilisation pass typically cancels around $1,840/mo of redundant app spend.
Verticals
Who we build for in Columbus
The categories that dominate Columbus’s commerce economy — and what each one needs from a Shopify build.
Beauty, fragrance & candles
The fill-and-pack supply chain is local, so small-batch launches are realistic — bundling and subscription then do the repeat-purchase work.
Strength & fitness equipment
Heavy freight, compatibility between plates, bars and racks, and spec-led buying make this a technical catalogue rather than a lookbook.
Collegiate & fan merchandise
Licensing rules, print-on-demand fallbacks and a demand spike measured in hours need inventory and page infrastructure set before August.
Wholesale suppliers going direct
Shopify B2B lets a brand that has always shipped to a retail buyer add a consumer storefront without maintaining two disconnected catalogues.
Districts we work across
Short North Arts DistrictGerman VillageEastonNew AlbanyDublinGrandview Heights
Why us, here
What we do differently for Columbus brands
Fit and returns are one project
Structured fit data, real garment measurements, review-based feedback and a reason-coded returns flow. Cutting return rate a few points usually beats anything we could do to your ad account.
Launch weeks that keep their inventory honest
Timed launches need cached templates, inventory reservation behaviour you have actually tested, and back-in-stock flows queued before the email goes out — not a hope that the theme holds.
We work to a season, not a campaign calendar
You plan in weeks, with a receipt plan and markdown dates behind it. So do we: collection structure, drop schedule, size-run visibility and the Klaviyo calendar all get built against your season rather than against a generic promotional grid borrowed from a different category.
Proof
Results from comparable brands
Client names withheld under NDA. Figures come from their own Shopify Analytics, GA4 and Search Console.
All case studiesPremium Skincare (DTC)
8-figure DTC brand, ~140 SKUs, US + CA · Shopify Plus (migrated from Magento 2)
Magento 2 cost $9k a month in hosting, extensions and emergency dev before a single feature shipped. Mobile LCP sat at 5.4 seconds and mobile converted at less than half the desktop rate across 68% of sessions. The named constraint: 11,412 indexed URLs and a top-3 organic position on their hero category, so a migration that lost rankings would cost more than the platform ever saved.
+41%mobile conversion rate1.62% to 2.28% over the first 90 days post-launch
5.4s → 1.8smobile LCP75th-percentile CrUX field data, not lab
+27%organic sessionssix months post-migration vs. pre-migration baseline, branded queries excluded
$108k/yrplatform cost removedhosting, extension licences and the standing emergency dev retainer
Performance Apparel (DTC)
~$6M/yr DTC, 900+ SKUs across size and colour variants, US · Shopify Plus
Returns ran at 31% and refund cost consumed the entire paid media margin. One size chart image served 40 different fits, and 62% of add-to-carts started on a collection page that never showed variant availability. The named constraint: no new product photography budget, so every fix had to come out of the existing asset library and the review corpus.
+29%sitewide conversion rate1.71% to 2.21%, five-month average
+14%average order value$84 to $96 once the threshold bar and cross-sell shipped
31% → 22%return ratenine-point drop, roughly $310k/yr in recovered margin
1.9x → 2.4xblended MERwith paid spend held flat throughout
FAQ
Working with us from Columbus
In order of impact: real garment measurements on every size rather than a generic chart, fit feedback from customers on the product page, photography that shows the product on more than one body, and a returns flow that records why. Once you have reason codes you can find the two styles causing most of the damage, which is usually where the fix is.
No. ConversionEX has a single office, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and every other market including Columbus is served remotely. We fly out for kickoffs and quarterly planning when it is worth the trip. We think a straight answer here is more useful than a coworking address on a contact page.
Keep the assortments genuinely different and never undercut your buyer on shared styles. Direct is where you test colourways, extended sizing and limited runs that a retail plan would never approve, and the sell-through data from that is worth more internally than the revenue. Set the pricing policy in writing before launch, not after someone notices.
Yes, and the platform is rarely the failure point — the theme is. We strip client-side weight from the launch template, test the inventory behaviour under load rather than assuming it, and make sure the back-in-stock and post-purchase flows are live before the campaign sends. Then we watch the first ten minutes together.
Extended sizing fails on buy depth far more often than on demand. Every size added is another unit of inventory on a style that may already be marginal, so we start from sell-through by size on what you already carry, extend on the two or three styles that can carry it, and let pre-order or made-to-order take the tail. On the store side it is straightforward: real measurements at every size, model imagery at more than one size, and size-level stock visibility so nobody is sold something that has not been cut since spring.
Nearby
Other markets close to Columbus
Ohio · OH
Cincinnati
Cincinnati is full of brands that are excellent at product and packaging and stuck with a website built for a shelf-first business. We fix the second half.
Pennsylvania · PAPittsburgh
A lot of Pittsburgh companies sell serious products through a website that works like a PDF catalogue. We build the store that lets a buyer find the part, see the price and reorder without calling anyone.
Michigan · MIDetroit
Detroit sells products that either fit or they don't. We build Shopify stores where a buyer can confirm that in one step, and where returns stop eating the margin.
Next step
Let’s talk about your Columbus store.
Thirty minutes with the strategist who would actually run your account. We screen-share your store, read your data live, and tell you the three highest-value things we can see from the outside.
Shopify or Shopify Plus stores doing $150k/mo or moreFounder, CEO or eCommerce lead on the callNo deck and no pitch — we open your store instead
Prefer to write it out? [email protected] gets a real reply the same business day, Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm MT.