Raw dog food, shipped frozenLaunch story
From pickup only to a Shopify store that ships frozen to the West.
Before its new store, RedTail Raw sold its raw dog food by pickup only: customers paid online, then booked a time to collect. We built a new Shopify store at redtailraw.com from the owners’ own design: a page and photo gallery for every blend, Build a Box with the saving applied at checkout, Subscribe & Save, frozen shipping to the western states it serves, and pages the owners update themselves.
- Engagement
- Client
- Client
- RedTail Raw
- Sector
- Raw dog food, shipped frozen
- Story
- Launch
- On the web
- redtailraw.com (opens in a new tab)
The number
The one figure we’ll stand behind.
Open the receipt for where it came from, how it was counted and when we last checked it. How we count
0 → 7
western states the store ships to, frozen; the old one was pickup only
Every order on the old store had to be collected in person. Checkout now offers frozen shipping exactly where the store says it ships.
receipt
SOURCE · The old store’s terms page and the new store’s public pages
METHOD · The old store’s terms page (captured 2026-09-29) reads “No shipping of products from this location. All orders are to be picked up.” The new store’s home page and Safe Handling page list frozen shipping at one flat rate to California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Nevada and Arizona, and its FAQ gives the same flat rate for the western states (checked 2026-10-19). At launch on 2026-10-15, test carts that were never checked out, with addresses in California, Oregon, Idaho and Arizona and in Texas and Colorado, confirmed that checkout offers the rate inside the zone and nothing outside it.
VERIFIED · 2026-10
CLASS · repository
✓ every number on this site opens its receipt
CLAIM · redtail-shipping-states
How we count01 · Where they started
A raw dog food business that sold by pickup
RedTail Raw sells raw dog food, frozen in chubs, from Northern California. Before its new store, customers paid in one place online, booked a pickup in another, and collected their order in person. Our work began as digital marketing, and the first step was a written baseline of where the store stood.
02 · The wall
The store had to come before the ads
Paid traffic would have landed on a store that could not take a shipped order. Every blend opened on the same page, titled like every other page and filled in after it loaded, so search engines had nothing of its own to list for a single blend, and the home page was heavy enough to drag on a phone. Shipping frozen food brought its own rules: one flat rate to the states the store serves, and box savings and subscriptions that checkout charges exactly as the pages promise.
03 · What we built
What we built.
Named systems, described by what they do, one part at a time.
Part 1: Their design, built page for page
RedTail’s team had already mocked up the store they wanted: big serif headlines on cream paper with a rust accent, in light and dark. We built it page for page as a working Shopify store, set the owners’ product photos into it, and designed what the mockup lacked to match: the cart, the contact form, the news pages, the policy pages and a photo gallery for every blend. The lineup puts every blend on one page with its photo, its ratio, its protein, fat and calories, and an Add button, and filters narrow it by protein in one tap.
- The owners’ mockup, built page for page
- Filters by protein across the whole lineup
- Sold-out blends fade and step out of the way on their own
Part 2: A page and a photo gallery for every blend
Each blend has its own page: a photo gallery with arrows, thumbnails and swipe, a size picker that shows the price per pound, a choice of one-time or Subscribe & Save, what is inside and the full analysis, and blends to rotate with. Every page carries its own title and description, so each blend can show up in search on its own.
- A gallery the owners reorder in Shopify, with the first photo on the card
- The price per pound on every size
- Product details search engines can read
Part 3: Build a Box, with the saving applied at checkout
Shoppers fill a box blend by blend with plus and minus buttons while a progress bar counts the pounds. The summary shows the subtotal, the box saving, shipping and the total, and the saving comes off at checkout by itself, with no code to type. We set up the store’s discounts to match the builder and checked them with test carts.
- A saving for each box size
- No discount code to type
- Subscribe & Save on the whole box
Part 4: Subscribe & Save on every blend and size
Every card and product page offers repeat delivery at a lower price, and a switch above the lineup shows every subscription price at once. The renewal terms sit beside every subscribe button, and shoppers manage, skip, pause or cancel from their own account.
- Renewal terms shown before checkout
- A manage-subscription link on every page
- Box savings set to carry into renewals
Part 5: Shipped frozen, paid for on its own domain
We set up one flat frozen-shipping rate for the western states the store serves, so checkout offers shipping exactly where the pages say it does. Then we connected the store’s own domain, redtailraw.com, with checkout on that domain and card, Shop Pay and PayPal payments.
- Shipping offered only where the store ships
- Checkout on the store’s own domain
- Search indexing switched on once the domain was live
Part 6: Answers before the questions
Shoppers new to raw feeding get short reads, Why Raw and the Feeding Guide, plus Safe Handling and an FAQ. The guide’s calculator turns a dog’s life stage and healthy weight into a starting portion per meal, per day and per month, and how many chubs that adds up to, with a button that goes straight to Build a Box.
- A portion calculator that ends at Build a Box
- Questions the owners add, reorder or hide
- A closing banner with a next step on every guide page
Part 7: A store the owners run themselves
Every headline, photo, question, customer quote, menu link and offer lives in plainly named sections of the Shopify admin, and we wrote a plain-English handbook for each kind of change. The owners can write news posts in Shopify, and a contact form brings messages to their inbox, so the Contact page carries no email address.
- Change an offer’s numbers once, and every sentence that quotes them updates
- News posts written in Shopify, with no extra app
- A contact form in place of an email address on the Contact page
04 · Up close
The work, up close.
Real screens and real product photography, uncropped. Select any image to enlarge it.
05 · More receipts
The supporting figures.
Same rule as the headline number: each one opens to its source, its method and the month we checked it.
16 MB → 2 MB
downloaded to open the home page on a phone, old store vs new
The old store’s home page measures the same today as it did on 2026-09-29, so the before still holds.
receipt
SOURCE · Google’s automated page test on a phone, run on the old store’s home page and on redtailraw.com
METHOD · Everything downloaded to open each home page in Google’s automated page test on a phone, with the same settings for both. Old store: 16.4 MB on 2026-09-29, and the same again on 2026-10-19. New store: 2.0 MB, the median of three runs on 2026-10-19 (all three 2.0 MB).
VERIFIED · 2026-10
CLASS · repository
✓ every number on this site opens its receipt
CLAIM · redtail-page-weight
How we count0 → 16
blends with a page of their own that search engines can list
On the old store every product opened on the same page, titled like every other page, with its name filled in after it loaded, so no blend had a page of its own for search to list.
receipt
SOURCE · The old store’s shared product page, and redtailraw.com’s sitemap and product pages
METHOD · Old store (2026-09-29): every product opened on the same shared page, titled like every other page, with its name and price filled in after the page loaded, and there was no sitemap. New store (2026-10-19): each of the 16 product addresses in its sitemap answers with its own title, description, address and product details already in the page, readable without running any of the page’s code.
VERIFIED · 2026-10
CLASS · repository
✓ every number on this site opens its receipt
CLAIM · redtail-product-pages
How we count80 → 95
home page accessibility score in Google’s automated test, old store vs new
Every photo on the home page is described in words or skipped where its card already names the blend, so a screen reader never meets an unlabeled image.
receipt
SOURCE · Google’s automated page test on a phone, run on the old store’s home page and on redtailraw.com
METHOD · The accessibility score in Google’s automated page test on a phone, for each home page: 80 for the old store on 2026-09-29 and again on 2026-10-19, and 95 for the new store in all three runs on 2026-10-19.
VERIFIED · 2026-10
CLASS · repository
✓ every number on this site opens its receipt
CLAIM · redtail-accessibility
How we count