Redesigning Tredz for Every Kind of Cyclist
Tredz partnered with GAIN to rethink how its online store served both its business and its customers, moving beyond one-off, manually built pages towards a flexible, content-led system that could showcase expertise, react to a shifting market, and turn browsers into buyers.
Stats
4.5% Conversion uplift
4.5%
1,500 Additional orders a month
1500
The Challenge
GAIN began with stakeholder interviews across the Tredz business, followed by collaborative workshops to explore the value proposition and the team’s aspirations and concerns for the transformation. This surfaced two recurring frustrations: a perceived lack of flexibility for the marketing team around promotional tools and levers, and web and content systems that were highly manual, relying on individuals to produce one-off pages and designs every time the business needed to respond to change. Solving this meant designing a system that could meet immediate needs with no-code updates to journeys and page layouts, while still holding firm on brand and change control governance.
Alongside this, GAIN got to know Tredz’s users through in-depth interviews and moderated usability sessions on the existing site. Tredz wanted to challenge the idea that cycling experts fit a single mould, opening the sport up to underrepresented cyclists from a wide range of backgrounds. GAIN built diversity into the research recruitment process from the outset, creating detailed personas that reflected a genuinely broad spectrum of experience, a lens applied to every major design decision that followed.
Client Testimonial
It was all about the IA and the taxonomy, we spoke to a range of ages and genders to understand the “why Tredz” question, analysis in quant and qual testing hit the target for success.
Zoe May – Principal UX Consultant
The strategy
Tredz wanted its site to be a destination for expertise, product reviews and quality cycling content, not just a place to buy parts. Balancing that ambition against the commercial need to get products in front of buyers called for a systematic approach to page and template structure. Through high-energy co-design sessions, GAIN and Tredz prototyped a system of dynamic content blocks that could be dialled up or down depending on how transactional a page needed to be, giving the marketing team the flexibility to react quickly in a volatile cycling market. Early-stage, browsing-focused pages could surface guides, reviews and inspirational content tailored to a visitor’s interests, while product pages carried a slimmer, more practical layer of content, such as fitting guides or sizing advice, aimed at serious, high-knowledge shoppers. This content also had a permanent home in the new information architecture, building a solid SEO foundation for Tredz as an expert-led destination.
To support this at scale, GAIN built the design system using atomic design principles, elements, atoms, molecules and organisms, giving the Tredz team a strong, well-governed toolkit for building near-endlessly customisable layouts without losing brand consistency. GAIN’s front-end and accessibility specialists then translated these components into Vue.js and Storybook, a shared, cloud-based repository letting both teams build tested, AA-accessible templates together.
The result
As sections of the new site went live, early results were striking. Releasing a redesigned basket and checkout journey alone delivered an immediate 4.5% conversion uplift, equivalent to 1,500 additional orders a month.