Visivite

"By the way, I wanted to let you and Eric know that our conversion rate skyrocketed from 2.5% to 4.5% with the new design."

We got this bit of good news from Paul Krawitz last month. I sat down with Paul to get a little more in-depth about his background, business, and experience with EYStudios.

Your Guy @ EY:
Hi, Paul, thanks for joining us. Can you start off by telling us about how VisiVite.com got its start?

Paul Krawitz:
In November 2001, the National Eye Institute published a groundbreaking study that showed, for the first time, that a specific mixture of high dose vitamins and antioxidants could slow the progression of a potentially blinding eye disease known as macular degeneration. VisiVite.com was one of the first companies to provide eye vitamins based upon this research. Our early efforts were a standard Yahoo store, and filling the one or two orders that came in per day.

During the middle phase of our growth, manually processing individual orders became implausible. We turned to Y Store Tools, later Your Store Wizards, the brain child of Don Cole. Don wrote some slick programming that automated much of what we did, even when we were processing 20-30 orders per day.

As our brand name continued to grow, sometimes shipping 70 orders in a day, we were forced to make more changes. We moved our shipments to a professional fulfillment center and our back-end order processing to a web based software, OrderMotion. Through outstanding customer service and well-designed vitamin supplements for macular degeneration, and later dry eye syndrome, we have continued to experience 30% annual growth.

Your Guy @ EY:
That's amazing. Now, how did EYStudios enter the picture?

Paul:
We were doing better business, yes. But our Yahoo Store hadn’t had a major facelift in nearly six years. It was still bogged down with that wretched and ubiquitous left navigation bar, which savvy customers quickly saw as a cookie-cutter design. Our product was high end, but our web site wasn’t. We needed to better reflect our site as an authority with respect to nutritional supplementation for ocular health.

We tried to have our current firm design the site. It was snazzy. But it lacked integrity and creativity. Worse, our project continued to get delayed by days, then weeks, and then finally months.

Luckily, we turned once again back to Don Cole at Y Store Tools, who strongly recommended Eric Yonge and his firm, EY Studios. We looked over Eric’s portfolio and were immediately impressed with his wide range and original art. He sealed the deal when he called us by phone and elucidated everything we were looking for.

Your Guy @ EY:
It seems like the very nature of VisiVite demands a critical eye towards detail. What thought went into those crucial elements?

Paul:
We had about ten different products, all treating eye disease, but designed for different levels of disease and different patient medical histories. We didn’t want a simple catalogue page, with all the products just stuffed together. We needed something that was understandable without being intimidating or complex.

Because Eric is an artist, and not just a web designer, we worked first on the logo. Hours were spent back and forth. Eric would churn out an idea, we’d respond, and sometimes the idea would get totally scrapped. Importantly, Eric was patient with our indecisiveness until one day, he showed us a basic image and we had found our “ahah.”

The remainder of the web design was carefully thought out, beautifully constructed, and done ahead of our anticipated schedule. Eric put us in touch with George Chityat from KingWebmaster. Where Eric was masterful at the graphic design, George was likewise with programming, often fixing issues before I had put the phone earpiece back in its cradle. Together, Eric and George made a formidable team - small enough to get boutique service, but powerful enough to compete with much larger firms.

Your Guy @ EY:
What was your experience working with Eric?

Paul:
Throughout the entire process, Eric Yonge helped us to feel a sense of calm confidence. His work consistently exceeded our expectations, and when we asked for changes, they were done quickly and willingly. Having Eric Yonge and EYStudios on our team was a winning choice for us. Our customers immediately applauded our attractive and approachable site. Thanks also to George Chityat’s clean coding, we suddenly grew more relevant in the search engines’ eyes. Finally, and most importantly, customers visiting our site now saw us as an authority, and their increased trust nearly immediately resulted in a doubling of our capture rate.

Your Guy @ EY:
Paul, thanks very much for taking the time to answer our questions. Any final thoughts?

Paul:
The whole team at VisiVite.com feels incredibly fortunate that we were able to work with such a high quality artist and person - Eric Yonge from EYStudios.



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