Overview

Founded for sneaker enthusiasts who sweat the small details, Lace Lab sells premium replacement shoelaces and accessories — from Rope Laces to 3M Reflectives to laces cut for popular sneaker models. Their customers often buy multiple colors and styles at once, mixing and matching to customize their shoes.

Lace Lab's mission is to help sneaker enthusiasts elevate their footwear through premium, durable, customizable laces and accessories that enhance style and longevity without stealing the spotlight from the sneakers themselves. They focus on high-quality materials, fit, and finish — because personal style lives in the details.

Problem

Lace Lab's growth depended on getting more customers to buy two or more laces per order and to add accessories like aglets and lace locks to their cart. But their cart experience was working against them.

The add-ons flow was unreliable in several ways:

• Cart behavior would break when removing items
• Odd cart splitting occurred
• Quantity changes would get stuck and add-to-cart actions would occasionally freeze.
• Most critically, add-ons sometimes failed to attach at all if a customer clicked checkout too quickly — a timing issue that silently cost them revenue on every affected order.

The core challenge was two-fold: increase AOV by encouraging multi-item and accessory purchases, and fix the underlying cart friction that was undermining the add-ons experience entirely.

Approach

Our agency partner, MakeBeCool, is a Shopify-specialized agency focused on custom development and conversion optimization. For LaceLab, MakeBeCool's work focused on two sequential phases, both aimed at making the cart experience reliable enough to support Lace Lab's growth goals.

Phase 1 — Add-ons reliability:

• Re-engineered the add-ons logic to fix a timing issue that caused accessories to sometimes not attach during fast checkouts.
• Introduced a brief checkout delay to ensure add-ons were fully attached before the customer proceeded — preventing silent revenue loss without impacting the customer experience.
• Enhanced logic to handle multi-lace carts, ensuring accessories attached to the correct line item when multiple lace styles were in the cart.

Phase 2 — Cartly integration with custom add-ons logic:

• Introduced Cartly as a structured cart layer to manage upsells and add-ons.
• Implemented custom add-ons logic within Cartly to preserve the reliability improvements from Phase 1.
• Enabled Lace Lab to configure upsells directly within the cart flow once Cartly was live.

Before: Add-ons were unreliable, cart behavior could break mid-session, causing friction and missed accessory revenue.

After:

• Cartly provided a structured upsell layer.
• Custom logic ensured accessories were added reliably.
• Cart behavior remained stable even during fast checkouts, preventing lost add-ons and revenue.

Results

After implementing the cart add-ons reliability improvements and Cartly integration, Lace Lab saw meaningful lifts across every key metric compared to the pre-work period.

The improvements to cart and add-ons reliability reduced friction and supported a higher add-on attachment rate throughout the cart flow, contributing to:

• Conversion rate increased from 4.3% to 6%, a nearly 40% relative improvement
• Revenue up approximately 12%
• Average Order Value increased 56%
• Quantity ordered per order grew by 28%, reflecting more customers adding multiple laces and accessories per visit

From challenge to growth

The case of LaceLab highlights what happens when the right pieces come together.

Lace Lab had a clear goal: get customers to buy more per order.

Instead of pushing more offers into a broken flow, MakeBeCool fixed the cart experience so upsells could actually convert. MakeBeCool didn’t just add upsells — they fixed the friction that was stopping them from working in the first place. Cartly gave the team a stable, flexible cart to build on. With Cartly in place as a reliable foundation, Lace Lab finally had the setup needed to grow AOV and items per order.

It’s a good reminder that real growth comes from fixing the system — not just adding to it.