There are very few family-owned businesses that have broken the 3-generation curse. Founded in 1968, Bathla is more relevant, more trusted, and more obsessed with the customer experience than ever before. With over 800 products across a growing number of categories, the company is a ubiquitous name in household products and sells one out of every two ladders in India.
Challenge
In 2022, Bathla found itself at a crossroads. Yes, it needed a conversion optimization app, but what it truly wanted was a growth partner that would help them run growth experiments in a systematic way, redefine what's possible for its long-term business, and ensure the company moves away from being gut-driven to data-driven.
“Prior to mason, everything was ad hoc and gut-driven. We lacked the insights, the confidence, and a structured approach to run experiments faster and more successfully. It was super chaotic!” Dev Bathla, CMO.
While Dev and his team regularly consulted with the Shopify team for Shopify apps and partners — and even used Rebuy for cross-selling and upselling. But they felt it wasn’t enough. "While Rebuy is a great tool for cart recommendations and all, what we needed was a holistic platform that would allow us to experiment faster across the entire site.” says Dev.
At the same time, Dev was yearning for industry insights and accidentally ran into the mason team at a conference. He remembers, "After I heard Kaus (mason co-founder) speak, it became super relevant to my business, and that's how I found out about Mason.”
Solution
Dev's team desired a growth partner that could enable them to move in the direction they wished for — to continuously uncover new ideas for experimentation, test them faster, and make the entire browse-to-buy journey a customer-centric one.
Bathla chose mason's Scale Plan to move forward as its growth partner. When asked why they chose Mason, Dev had this to say:
“The reason for choosing mason was not just about ModeMagic's features. Although that was an important part, it was more about the people - given how knowledgeable the mason team is. In fact, they bring their A-team for execution, unlike others who use their A-team for selling and then deploy a B-team for execution.”
The company tapped into mason scale plan’s growth advisory and weekly reviews to help guide what needs to be improved and tested across their site. With ModeMagic, a no-code store optimization app installed on their Shopify site, the first real test of this new partnership was approaching quickly.
Results
For the first time ever, Bathla saw a 300% conversion uplift on their core product segment — thanks to the robust experimentation roadmap and the ability to test and see the impact of the experiments from a single platform — all without the need to instrument anything on their site.
Two major enhancements across the collection page and product pages have contributed to the increase in macro conversions.
Category-Specific Filter: Bathla's core product segment - Ladders - has multiple sub-categories within it, such as steel, aluminium, and telescopic ladders. There were category filters for all of them. Yet, their Ladders collection page had a high bounce rate of 65%.
It turned out that the culprit was a filtering logic that did not align with users' expectations.
Users were not interested in filtering the product list by generic site-wide attributes such as steel, aluminium, material, size, and colors. At least, not right off the bat.
So, to align filtering logic with user expectations, the mason team implemented three category-specific visual filters above the fold. The result? The company has seen session duration go up by 45%, pages per session increase by 1, and the bounce rate on the collection page decrease by 20%.
“It’s the fresh and innovative ideas that continuously come out from the mason team that impresses me the most. Regardless of whether those ideas work or fail, we know we’re learning a lot faster — and that makes me confident in our approach.” Dev Bathla, CMO
A better product discovery experience was one thing. Another was to combat the drop-offs happening on Bathla's product pages.
Prior to mason's involvement, Bathla's product pages had an extremely high bounce rate of 75%. Now, that has been reduced by 20% as well — thanks to trust elements, product banners, and visual store blocks, all powered by ModeMagic conversion playbooks with no action required on Bathla's part.
