( 00-01 )
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Cugo had a premium product and growing demand. Their website was costing them both.
Cugo World is a premium baby-care brand with real traction — quality products, a loyal customer base, and a founder who understood the market deeply. But the online experience told a different story. Mobile conversion was lagging. Product pages weren't building trust fast enough. Checkout was losing customers at the final step.
The founder knew something needed to change. The harder problem was knowing what to fix first — and finding the bandwidth to actually fix it while running the business.
This wasn't a redesign engagement. It was a product partnership. Year One embedded as a dedicated senior pod, took ownership of the strategic decisions, and executed without pulling the founder into every detail.
( 00-02 )
CHALLENGES
The real problem wasn't the site. It was decision paralysis.
Every conversation surfaced a new priority — mobile conversion, trust signals, checkout friction, performance, messaging clarity. Without a clear framework for trade-offs, the founder was personally evaluating every UX recommendation and technical decision while simultaneously running the business.
Previous vendor relationships hadn't helped. Deliverables arrived without context, continuity, or accountability for outcomes. The founder needed a partner who owned decisions and execution — not one who handed off designs and disappeared.
Three compounding problems made this harder than a typical product engagement:
Founder cognitive overload. Without dedicated product leadership, every design decision and technical trade-off landed on the founder's desk. This created bottlenecks and pulled attention away from growth, operations, and customer relationships.
High stakes for getting it wrong. In the premium baby-care market, trust is everything. A misstep in messaging, checkout experience, or mobile performance doesn't just cost a sale — it costs the brand's reputation with exactly the customers it's trying to win.
No execution ownership. Previous vendors delivered outputs. Year One needed to deliver outcomes — with the judgment, continuity, and accountability to back it up.
( 00-03 )
RESULTS
Faster, leaner, and a store experience that matches their brand value.
The same senior team that framed the strategy built and shipped the solution. No handoff between strategy and execution. No knowledge loss. No drift between what we agreed and what got delivered.
The headless Shopify storefront — built on Hydrogen + Remix-Oxygen with SSR — achieved a desktop Performance score of 94/100 and a perfect SEO score of 100/100 via Lighthouse. Desktop LCP hit 1,322ms with zero layout shift (CLS: 0.000) and zero blocking time (TBT: 0ms). Performance went from a liability to a brand signal.
Conversion impact: Store conversion rate up 30% — from 1.0% to 1.3% Add-to-cart rate up from 4.0% to 5.2% Checkout initiation rate up from 2.2% to 2.9% Revenue per visitor up 25%
What mattered beyond the metrics: zero rework or course corrections during execution. Decisions held. The founder's time was freed to focus on operations, customer relationships, and growth — not daily product calls. And for the first time, Cugo's digital experience reflected the actual quality of what they sell.
The gap between a good product and a trusted brand is almost always an experience problem. That's the gap Year One is built to close.
( 00-03 )
DISCOVER MORE
