Apparel brand Vessi is always considering conversion when deciding on what to test and implement, according to Ray Hua, director of D2C and lifecycle marketing at the company.
He told Digital Commerce 360 that his role surrounds maintaining a good site experience for visitors. Hua elaborated that conversion rate optimization (CRO) discipline guides much of his work at Vessi.
“We want to run tests,” he told Digital Commerce 360. “We want to run three to four tests per month, no matter how big or small.”
Those tests are to gather customer feedback that Vessi then turns into insights to identify friction points. He noted that Vessi reviews on-site funnel data on both a daily and weekly basis. It looks at different drop-off fluctuations from week to week, as well as qualitative feedback from customers, which includes issues at checkout.
Those data points inform Vessi’s conversion-testing strategies, Hua said. That can guide changes to copy on product detail pages (PDPs). It can also lead Vessi to work on product changes.
“It’s really a lot of CRO in different disciplines — in creative, in copy — at the end of the day to drive that add-to-cart and conversions,” Hua said. He added that Vessi doesn’t “create work based on assumptions. Let’s work on things that we identified as frictions from data points, whether qualitative or quantitative.”
Where omnichannel options fit into Vessi conversion strategies
“It’s really, really important to keep testing even though sometimes we’ll probably have more failed tasks than winning tasks,” Hua said. “At the end of the day, it’s really important to understand what we learn from it, and then create the knowledge base that can inform the strategies that can inform product strategies, that can inform our marketing strategies, those kinds of things.”
One example was with omnichannel offerings such as buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS). When Hua joined Vessi in late 2021, arriving from Staples Canada, the former had begun growing its physical-store presence. Vessi benefits from the web traffic boost that came with the COVID-19 pandemic. But when governments lifted pandemic-related restrictions, Vessi also saw consumers turning more to its brick-and-mortar locations.
His time at Staples Canada spanned from mid-2017 to late 2021, which includes the peak of the pandemic. During that peak, he said, 30% to 50% of Staples Canada’s revenue came from omnichannel offerings like BOPIS as well as on-site search.
That was different when he arrived at Vessi. A small percentage of website visitors used on-site search, he said. That made it no longer a mandatory feature, as was the case with BOPIS.
“At the time, we only had very limited stores — like one store — and tried that,” Hua said. “And we didn’t see a really good uptick in people leveraging it. I don’t really like creating an experience just to test. It’s important to make sure a feature like buy online, pick up in store is a good experience, make sure it’s effortless for our customers. Otherwise, it just creates friction and damages our brand.”
Vessi learned that implementing such omnichannel offerings, especially after the pandemic, took more effort than it could justify, he said. That effort didn’t result in the matching value it sought to create for itself or its customers, he said.
Ecommerce sales trends Vessi noticed in 2025 and early 2026
Unlike some big-box retailers, Vessi operates relatively small stores, Hua said. It doesn’t have the capacity to fulfill online orders from its stores, he said. Instead, it mainly fulfills from distribution centers using third-party logistics (3PL). Its challenge on the supply chain side since last year has been updating its assortment between its markets, which include Canada and the U.S.
Plus, in 2025 and early 2026, Vessi has noticed a “way better response when we actually put things on sale,” he said. Part of that is because U.S.-imposed tariffs “definitely squeezed our margin” in the past year, along with the removal of the de minimis exemption. That has made prices “more sensitive” for both the brand and its customers, he said.
Countering the impact on margins, Hua said Vessi didn’t invest much in new technology in the past year. Instead, it leveraged new artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled features that didn’t come with additional costs. In its case, that included using AI-powered Sidekicks from Shopify to help pull reports.
He also noted that even though Vessi condensed its Black Friday–Cyber Monday (BFCM) promotion to two weeks in 2025 from one month in previous years, it saw “a good amount of growth.”
“So it’s truer a period, which means there’s urgency and time sensitiveness for them to convert at the time,” Hua said. He added that BFCM is also when Vessi receives a lot of first-time visitors to its site to try to acquire as customers.
Although he couldn’t specify an amount, Hua said more than half of Vessi’s sales still come from ecommerce.
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