JOrange

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

OwnTheLooks is an e-commerce company selling women’s apparel. It was established 10 years ago, and it sells clothes to over 100 countries.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with JOrange?

Our first website had been custom-built, and that didn’t work out so well. We moved to Magento and got hacked, which was embarrassing. Someone put their picture on our homepage.

We decided a few years ago to move to Shopify, and couldn’t find anyone locally to do it for us. Before going to Dima (Founder and CEO), we worked with 4–5 other programmers, who basically destroyed our theme and made a mess of things.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

JOrange developed our new website from scratch and got our page speed optimized, which was very challenging for Shopify at the time. We were looking to get a green on Google PageSpeed for mobile and desktop, and JOrange made that happen.

From there, we started the integration with our inventory management system and accounting system. Dima was very hands-on with that, and he always figured out how to make things work.

They were able to customize different plug-ins on the backend of the website, optimizing them for site speed. Everything flows together, and we were able to achieve a lot of automation in tagging. They implemented some cool filter options, which everyone we’d spoken to before told us were impossible to do.

What is the team composition?

I didn’t interact with anyone other than Dima, but maybe my team did.

How did you come to work with JOrange?

It might’ve been through Upwork, but I’m not sure.

How much have you invested with them?

$50,000–$100,000

What is the status of this engagement?

The initial project took place between November 2017–July 2018. We still use them from time to time.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

JOrange is very good with Shopify and very creative. It was just a good, refreshing experience. It felt like Dima was part of the team, and this made a world of difference for our company and saved us a lot of time. He has strong business acumen and is very technically strong as well. As non-developers, we needed someone to come up with creative solutions to our problems, as well as with improvements for things we didn’t even know we needed to improve.

There was a very big focus at the time on conversion and optimization, so it was very important to get through the hurdle with Shopify. There was no one local where we were, so we were forced to speak to different providers online, and a lot of the things we wanted to do got pushback from different people. They were telling us that we couldn’t design it the way we wanted, but Dima made it happen.

In particular, the zoom functionality on mobile is absolutely fantastic. It’s nicer than the one on Amazon. I can safely say that it’s the nicest click-to-zoom that I’ve ever come across. The way it functions is quite unique, compared to other websites. This was some time ago, so I don’t know whether the market has changed and it’s become the standard or not, but it was very special at the time.

How did JOrange perform from a project management standpoint?

I believe there was a project management tool in place. Our company was using Asana, and JOrange was using another tool at some point.

What did you find most impressive about them?

What we liked about them was that the relationship was very fair. No developer knows every single thing, and they do have to research sometimes, but we never felt that we were being charged for that time.

There was always a fair rate, whether something took two weeks or one hour to do. If the time was going toward research and testing because of something they didn’t know, they never charged us for it.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I think they could probably reduce their prices now, maybe just for us.