Founder Briana Lyon was on a camping trip in the craggly landscapes of Southern California when the seeds of her low-water landscaping brand, California Wild, were planted. “I was just spending the morning observing the wildlife and the ecology, and realized I was only a half an hour drive from the heart of the city, if that,” she recalls. “But the environment couldn’t have been more different.” Briana wanted to find a way to bring more wild spaces into the places we actually live — and support wildlife without sacrificing style. “That was four years ago,” she says. “I’ve been building it as a side project ever since.”
California Wild officially hit the web in 2021, but before she went live, Briana knew that it would take some heavy lifting to package and brand her new project in a way that was easy to understand and simple to purchase. “It took a really long time to model the concept in a way that people could understand,” says Briana.
In order to make California Wild as beautiful and accessible as the simple-to-implement plant packs she offers, Briana turned to Shopify and Vimeo Create on her road to ecommerce bliss. Here’s how Briana is making it work on — and saving the earth — amidst the many demands of solopreneurship.
Product imagery you can root for
Before Briana could start building an ecommerce pipeline for her idea, she needed two things: killer brand imagery and a website she could be proud to show off. To build her online presence, she turned to Shopify — “super easy to use,” notes Briana — to build her website, no coding experience required. “I’ve been really happy with it,” she says. “I’ve been working on that store for years to really create a user experience that feels fresh.”
Next, Briana needed to figure out how she could visually represent her plant packs and landscaping offerings without the money or time to plant and cultivate a garden of her own. So, she developed a process of photographing and collaging botanical samples to illustrate her vision. “That was a labor of love,” she adds. “The whole time I was doing that, I was pregnant with my daughter and nursing her as a baby. It was a lot of graphic design and Grey's Anatomy.”
Low maintenance lawns, low maintenance videos
With that done, it was time to package her content in a way that was easy to understand and reduced buyer friction. “We have an innovative product,” Briana notes. “So Vimeo is a super powerful tool for conveying how they work without endless pages of infographics and text.”
Using Vimeo Create’s templates to power her lovingly designed product imagery, Briana is able to easily craft stylish explainer videos perfect for embedding on product pages and throughout her website.
“I was blown away with how great Vimeo’s templates are for creating super snazzy content with all the bells and whistles,” Briana adds. "This tool handled all the leg work for me."
Sprouting seeds (and sales)
But adding Vimeo Create videos to her Shopify site didn’t just boost Briana’s brand identity. After just a few weeks of adding videos to some of her most popular products, Briana saw her overall site traffic jump by 24%, along with a 28% increase in unique visitors and a 29% boost in adds to cart. “I am just launching my business, Briana says. “But I can tell you that the quality, cleanliness, and professionalism of my website went from meh to mesmerizing with Vimeo.”
“As an artist, I always want to make things more detailed, but people really need simplicity and clarity,” she adds. “Finding Vimeo, paired with simple tools like Shopify, made it so easy for me to plug in these years’ worth of experimental work that I’d done, and translate that into a really understandable product.”
