Cheerful Buddha needed help to develop the international side of their business – So we built them a powerful Shop 2.0 theme, packing in tons of valuable ecommerce features, and enabling them to expand into international markets cost-effectively.
Cheerful Buddha is a superfoods and CBD retailer. Founded in 2019, they offer a carefully curated selection of food and beverages, all developed to have mind- and body-boosting properties. Their products, made from the very best of all-natural ingredients, range from naturally-flavoured CBD drops, to a lion’s mane mushroom coffee with the power to boost your focus and mental well-being.
A key requirement though was that the platform had to launch internationally.
Cheerful Buddha was initially a client of Inspira – working with our team to launch the business on Shopify in 2017. Due to increasing success their business had grown. However the old site had become dated, and was hard to manage owing to poorly implemented theme settings by a third party dev team. Additionally the site just didn't cater very well to the increasing international demand for Cheerful Buddha’s products.
Cheerful Buddha didn’t want to limit their audience to only one region. So returned to the Inspira team to help them both update and improve the site, whilst also looking better serve their growing international demand across the UK, Europe and the US.
We began the project with a workshop that helped both establish the needs and scope of the solutions required in detail with the client. Key drivers of the project we established with Cheerful Buddha were:
Working with these key points, we were able to craft a tailored upgrade strategy for Cheerful Buddha – that took full advantage of the powerful features in Shop 2.0, while implementing Shopify Markets as our vehicle for international sales. Added to that, a lean approach also allowed us to bring in a number of bonus, upgraded features too. Let’s look at each of those points in turn.
The powerful suite of tools and functions included in Shop 2.0 makes it an attractive option for any companies looking to seriously grow their business on the Shopify platform. In the case of Cheerful Buddha, upgrading to Shop 2.0 would allow us to build in the following features:
Shop 2.0 allows apps to be added to your store from the theme editor, without the need for any custom code. Apps also uninstall cleanly, without leaving behind stray code that can slow down your site.
Shopify Themes have had ‘sections’ for a long time, which allow merchants to quickly add new content areas, change their display order, or to easily turn content blocks on or off. Traditionally this was limited to the Home page, but with Shopify 2.0, these powerful customisation tools become available across all pages. Helping to provide Cheerful Buddha to handle more site changes internally.
Using Shop 2.0, merchants can add custom data fields (meta fields) into their product descriptions, or other content blocks. What does this mean? Well for example, on a product page you might want to add additional details showing “Ingredients,” “Warnings,” or “Instructions for Use.” With a legacy theme, you would have needed the help of a developer to implement these extra content types – but with Shop 2.0 it becomes incredibly straightforward to add and customise rich data directly in the theme editor, further enabling the Cheerful team to take on day to day management of the site.
We recently shared our thoughts on two different approaches to going international on Shopify – by using either the built-in multi-currency options of Shopify Markets, or for larger businesses or those with dedicated regional offices, the strategy of creating semi-autonomous expansion stores. In the case of Cheerful Buddha their needs were best answered by the Shopify Markets solution.
This will keep their business streamlined and efficient, while opening them up to a larger audience than ever before.
As we developed our plan for Cheerful Buddha’s upgrade, we found there were a number of additional benefits we were able to deliver too. These included:
By the end of the project, Cheerful Buddha was up and running with a fantastic modern store. It’s the perfect platform for their product range, launched and ready to open them up to international customers. We said that the benefits of using a Shop 2.0 theme would include:
We are happy to report that all these benefits were delivered, and more. Shopify Markets proved the perfect way to take Cheerful Buddha international, opening up their business and massively multiplying their potential audience.
