We were lucky to catch up with Rebecca Worsley recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Rebecca thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
Rainy City is a Shopify Plus Partner who specialises in UX design, front and back end development and strategy for high growth Shopify merchants. We like to work with brands over the long-term and work alongside them as a proactive partnership who are on the lookout for opportunities in the market. We’re not just a regular To-Do list dev agency, we care about our brands and their growth. Our projects consist of full website redesigns or replatforming over to Shopify from other CMS’s. We typically help merchants across Health & Beauty, Fashion & Accessories and have a particular love for subscription brands!
My first graduate job paid me a grand salary of £15k a year and I needed more! So I started launching mini businesses – first I learnt how to build an Amazon brand. This wasn’t successful, but it gave me a taste of what it was like to be an entrepreneur. I then started importing boho jewellery from China via AliExpress and selling it at the Makers Markets every weekend around Manchester. I stood out in all weathers but had such a great time and was earning more money each weekend. I always knew I couldn’t be an employee, I needed to see scope and growth and if that wasn’t there I lost interest.
After a year or so, I moved with my fiance to Barcelona to sell my jewellery online and at local markets. This proved a lot more difficult since I didn’t speak fluent Spanish but I gave it my best shot. We tried really hard to sell the jewellery online but didn’t know the importance of how to build a brand yet. We sat down and searched for dropshipping suppliers in the US. We needed quality products that would arrive to the customers quickly. We found an all-American T-Shirt wholesaler and built a store, started running ads and by month two we were turning over $175k. Again though, we didn’t know how to build a brand and used freelancers to help build the site and make any changes we needed. Unfortunately, when Facebook’s algorithm changed we lost our main revenue source. We just did not have a sustainable business model.
We joined another programme and set out creating a skincare brand La’Vive. This time we built more of a brand, manufactured our own products and I created my first Shopify store and started building $200 Shopify sites for other members of the programme. I joined Upwork as a freelancer and it got to the point where I had to make a decision on the route I wanted to go – Shopify Design or Brand Building and I chose Shopify!
I founded the company on 16th November 2017 – very specific I know – but I remember this day super clearly. Before I started the company I was on the brand side, and the turning point was building my own skincare brand, it was the first move away from dropshipping and was very pricey to get started, so to pay for this I started building Shopify sites for other members in the group for $200. I joined lots of groups on Facebook relating to Shopify to try and find new clients and signed up to Upwork. I found one group that was huge and totally specialised to Shopify, the guy who ran this group also had a Shopify specific freelancer platform – Storetasker. I remember saying to Pete (my fiancé) , “Shall I apply to go on here?”, he said he didn’t think it was worth it as I have no design or dev background. We landed back in Manchester from Thailand and were driving to his parents in North Wales when I took the interview. Long story short I got in! I joined Storetasker on the 16th November 2017 and the rest is history. I quickly rose to being the top rated expert on the platform with the highest revenue month on month.
Since leaving Storetasker and changing from a lifestyle business to a real agency we have grown to a Shopify Plus Partner agency – the highest accolade you can have within our world, and a team of 22.
Rebecca, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Based in Manchester, UK Rainy City Agency employs a team of 20 whose skills range from business and marketing strategy to UX design and engineering. The agency will top £1m turnover for the first time in 2023, driven by a growing US client portfolio now representing almost 80% of its current client base. Since launch it has worked for over 400 companies across the UK and internationally, generating revenues for clients of over $50m with average client partnership lifetimes of three years plus. Its services include website redesign, focusing on optimising the store for customer experiences, replatforming to Shopify Plus and ongoing optimization services focused around UX, CX, CRO and other eCommerce metrics.
The agency looks for opportunities in its clients’ niche and develops a strategic plan to stand out and grow.
They have helped several merchants across health & beauty, fashion & accessories sectors and have a particular love for subscription brands! But they will work with anyone who has the ambition to scale a successful business up.
The agency loves working in the US market as they have a great understanding of Shopify and recognise the importance of having a great website that converts.
They do have clients all over the world though – ,UK, France, Germany, Australia and UAE – that’s one of the things Rebecca loves about e-commerce. You can reach and connect to people all over.
Rebecca is the only female lead in Shopify’s community of European Plus Partners and her commitment to the software is absolute.
In October last year they started to develop their own Shopify theme for the Shopify Theme Store! Rebecca commented: “I’m excited about this as it allows our team to really push their skills and learn something new. It makes sense for us to branch into this – we work with the themes on a daily basis and know what our merchants’ pain points are with using them so this is a great extension of what we already do.
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
Results, results, results! Rainy City Agency likes to work with brands over the long term and build proactive partnerships with ambitious companies who are on the lookout for opportunities in the market. Rainy City is not just a regular ‘to do’ list dev agency. They care about their brands and their growth.
A great example of this is Sparkle in Pink. The agency increased their conversion rate by 15%, total orders by 19% and a 16% increase in AOV. Here’s how:
Sparkle in Pink is a boutique children’s clothing brand based in Utah in the US. They design high quality original clothing and focus on selling only the trendiest items.
Their Shopify store had been running very slowly. By reviewing the website data over time and seeing the user flow, we found certain sticking points throughout the store that were stopping users from converting.
To keep elements of the store and functionality the same across different platforms, we worked on Sparkle in Pink’s Android app. To get the data from their Shopify store to their Android app, we used Retrofit to seamlessly get the data from the Growave API endpoints and updated their product and collection pages to show the reviews. Using industry-leading UX strategies we helped visitors better navigate through the site, guiding them to products that they may be interested in.
We optimised the back end code to increase site speed from 7 to an average of 65. This increased their conversion rate by 15%, total orders by 19% and a 16% increase in AOV.
Braden Larsen, CMO of Sparkle in Pink said working with Rainy City had been amazing. He said: “We have finally found a dev team we can rely on, and it has been a game changer for our company! 10/10. I would recommend this team to anyone with Shopify theme development needs.”
Another key element to building reputation is Rebecca’s hands on approach to the business, committed to building a positive culture and taking pride in high performance at levels whilst still having fun as a team. She has had lots of different hats in the company from designer to project manager, but now tends to focus on business development. And she takes a fearless approach to that. This year for the first time she hosted a dinner in New York for existing and potential US clients and to underline her commitment Stateside she has appointed the agency’s first ever US-based bus dev person, starting this June and hopes to have a office base there in the next two years.
The agency also hosted its first Shopify Meetup in Manchester city centre last Autumn. Think amazing industry insights, AMA panels and of course a happy hour for the chance to network and learn from each other.
Rebecca puts a heavy focus on Women in Tech – this is something she is really passionate about. She commented: “The tech industry is very male-dominated – I’ve often been to events and been the only female there and I’d like to change that. I want to encourage female entrepreneurs, coders, designers – everyone that works in our industry. Our team is actually made up of 10 females out of the 20 we have employed so we’re doing pretty well in terms of balance!
What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?
The most effective strategy for growth with our clients has been working as a proactive partnership – we’re not just a typical dev agency where you send us a To-Do list of action items for their website, we look at areas to optimize, improve and continuously grow utilising A/B testing, heatmap analysis and auditing of their sites.
Our approach has led to client referrals and the ability to generate great case studies to showcase our work and talent to potential prospects.
We put a heavy focus on outbound. Outflow = inflow and it’s a motto we’ve always stuck too at Rainy City, we’ve never been complacent and waited for merchants to find us, we’re out in the community and out at events and super active across our social channels to ensure we’re always in front our ideal client profile (ICP) and anyone that could help us reach our ICP.
One key area we look at with outbound is using email outreach, we have a great strategy and in-house team that manage to capture our ICP’s attention and want to find out more, a typical first step after our outreach and initial sales call is to offer a free UX audit of their site, this allows us to show them our thought process and how we work, it’s great at showcasing our design and CRO teams talents and gives them an insight on how we would go about working with them.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://rainycityagency.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rainycityagency/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rainycityagency/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rainy-city-agency/