BT Outdoors

BT Outdoors is a fishing gear brand with an established Amazon business that expanded into a direct-to-consumer channel under the label Circle B Tackle.

Role: Product Designer (End-to-End)
Timeline: Initial Launch: 2 weeks
Redesign: 1 month
Platform: Web (CMS)
Scope: Direct-to-consumer experience
Focus: Conversion, navigation, product retrieval
Outcome: 2x revenue within one year

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Overview

I was initially brought on to design and launch their first website quickly, using standard e-commerce patterns to get the business online.

The first version shipped in two weeks.

Six months later, despite strong traffic from existing customers, the site was underperforming.

The first pass

The initial version followed conventional e-commerce patterns:

Homepage structured around discovery and promotion
Layered category navigation
Product browsing optimized for exploration

Initial launch (v1) landing page experience

This approach assumed browsing behavior. With a two-week timeline, I relied on familiar e-commerce patterns to ship quickly.

What broke

Despite directing Amazon customers to the site, customers continued purchasing through Amazon instead.

Customer behavior revealed a mismatch:

Users weren't browsing
Users arrived with specific products in mind
Users expected direct access, not exploration

What worked for general e-commerce didn't work here. The system forced high-intent users into low-intent flows.

BT Outdoors category browsing section from the initial e-commerce experience — Users were forced into category-based browsing before reaching products.

Initial launch (v1) category section

BT Outdoors bestsellers product grid from the initial e-commerce experience — Product modules prioritized exploration over direct product access.

Initial launch (v1) bestsellers section

Constraints

The redesign had to evolve the existing system rather than replace it.

The site was already live with active customers
Product structure and inventory were already in place
The catalog spanned over 1,400 SKUs across 500+ products
The platform limited how deeply the backend could be restructured
Familiarity needed to be maintained for repeat buyers

These constraints required simplifying the experience within the system, not rebuilding it from scratch.

Path to product

The homepage needed to function as a launch point for intent, not a showroom for browsing. The redesign focused on compressing the path from entry to product.

From the homepage, users needed to:

Enter directly into a known category
View relevant products immediately
Move toward checkout with minimal navigation

The objective was to reduce the path to product from 3-4 interactions to 1-2.

Before

Homepage
→ All Products
→ Category
→ Subcategory
→ Product

4-5 steps

After

Homepage
→ Category
→ Product

1-2 steps

Structural shift

After defining a clear path to product, I shifted the site from a discovery-first experience to a retrieval-focused one.

Category structures and navigation were aligned with how customers actually think about products, using familiar terminology, accounting for brand affinity, and accommodating overlapping product groupings rather than strict taxonomy.

BT Outdoors category-first product surface with 25 primary categories — Primary product categories surfaced directly at entry.

Product category entry points (v2)

Decisions

I surfaced primary product categories directly on the homepage, replaced promotional modules with category-first navigation, simplified terminology, and reduced hierarchy depth to minimize steps to product.

Outcome

Users could move directly from entry to product without navigating layered category structures, reducing friction between intent and action.

Final result

The redesigned experience aligned the site with actual customer behavior. Users could reach products in as little as one click from the homepage.

The result was a measurable shift in performance. Within a year, site revenue doubled, driven by improved conversion from existing traffic.