Chris Sherman joined the Duxbury, Massachusetts–based Island Creek Oysters throng at 13, working at its neighboring general store. By 2009, when he was promoted to CEO, the corporation primarily sold directly to a handful of Boston-area restaurants and local distributors. But Chris saw more potential to scale the brand through ecommerce, innovative logistics, and careful brand building. Since then, he’s helped transform Island Creek Oysters from a tiny oyster farm into a additional expense seafood powerhouse that ships to 46 states.
Ahead, Chris shares how Island Creek Oysters took the ecommerce plunge, and continues to boost income.
Finding product-economy fit
The corporation’s first enterprise into ecommerce in 2010 was modest. “We did like $6,500 in income the first year online,” Chris shares. “That was probably $6,000 more than I thought we were gonna do. Our large question was, I just didn’t ponder anyone was gonna desire to shuck oysters at home.” But soon, customers returned online to buy more, sharing photos and videos of themselves shucking oysters at parties and events.
After blowing his income projections out of the water, Chris knew the demand for direct-to-buyer additional expense seafood was there, so he decided to lean into ecommerce. Today, Island Creek Oysters does millions in sales each year.
Scaling ecommerce strategically
A series of intelligent decisions over period has made it feasible for Island Creek to scale its online presence.
1. Building customer depend
It was significant, Chris says, for customers to be able to depend that their seafood would arrive at a temperature that was secure for consumption. “[Customers] are picky about [arrival] dates,” Chris says. “The core test is maintaining that temperature in the packaging.” In order to solve this issue, he installed temperature monitoring devices into each package. Now, customers can check to make sure that the proper temperature has been maintained throughout trip.
2. Solving shipping economics
One of Island Creek Oysters’ earliest breakthrough moments came from analyzing its Shopify data. “We had a high cart abandonment rate,” Chris explains. The answer? Embedding shipping costs directly into product prices, and making the product shipping expense free to customers—a shift that eliminated all but a tiny percentage of those cart abandonments—and caused income to triple.
3. Mixing up marketing strategies
Rather than relying solely on digital advertising, Island Creek Oysters takes a holistic way to its marketing schedule—one built on experimentation. “We’ve tried everything over the years,” Chris says. “We tried [discount] codes that we pass out at events, we spent a lot on in-house creative [for digital marketing], display ads.”
In addition to digital marketing, Chris took the oysters on the road to spread the word through live events and demos. “We were on the road for years and years doing events and things like that. So I like to ponder we helped benevolent of drive the oyster Renaissance, as we call it,” Chris says. Having multiple touch points for different types of customers will navigator to steady growth.
Selecting partnerships that drive growth
Island Creek Oysters’ connection with renowned restaurants has been a critical piece of reinforcing the brand’s additional expense reputation. Its oysters, for example, are featured in a signature dish at Thomas Keller’s Per Se and The French Laundry. The oysters, Chris notes, are “one of the few things that have stayed on the menu every day since Per Se opened.”
Affiliation with restaurants known for sourcing only the highest-standard ingredients allows Island Creek to maintain additional expense pricing with its direct customers, and in turn afford the best equipment feasible and provide competitive wages for employees—all of which ensures that product standards are kept high.
Maintaining standard as you expand
The corporation has strategically expanded into recent categories like caviar and tinned fish while staying factual to its core values of sustainability. Key to achievement in these recent ventures has been in building and independently owning its own supply chain wherever feasible. In addition to the online store, for example, Island Creek Oysters has built its own cannery nearby in recent Bedford for tinned fish, and set up in-house caviar packing. This vertical integration allows it to maintain standard control and trace its products at every step.
This dedication to standard in the midst of growth is just one of the reasons people have loved Island Creek for so long. And the numbers talk for themselves: 60% of online business comes from repeat customers, and average order worth is approximately $150.
Island Creek Oysters continues to create in aquaculture, expand the sustainable seafood economy, and explore recent product offerings. “The rising tide floats all boats,” Chris notes, as the brand now distributes for hundreds of other farms while maintaining its additional expense position in the economy.
Catch the packed interview on the Shopify Masters podcast and discover how Chris continues to enhance the online shopping encounter for additional expense seafood while growing Island Creek Oysters’s brand recognition.
