Bracia Ziółkowscy is a craft coffee roastery run by two brothers, Włodek and Jarek. They started roasting for themselves in 2002, in a cast-iron pan at home. Today they roast premium and specialty coffee, supply independent cafés and offices, and show up at every serious coffee event in Poland.
Their customers know coffee. Specialty drinkers want variety, origin stories and full transparency. Premium buyers want a safe place to start. Business clients want coffee that is always available and sells off the shelf. One store had to serve all of them.
The brothers already sold online, on WooCommerce. They thought about a new store for about a year and a half before they started. The old one worked, but it was built from a template. Looking back, we see three problems.
Conversion sat at 3.3%, driven mostly by loyal, returning customers. There was little top-of-funnel activity. That was a hidden risk: scaling paid campaigns on a store like this usually pulls conversion down. Before buying more traffic, the store had to be ready to receive it.
We stopped working from briefs years ago. Every project starts with a strategic workshop, and this one did too.
The brothers' aha moment came early. We spent less time on what they thought about their coffee and more on what their customers thought. How do they buy? What do they look for in a coffee, and what do they avoid? Where do they hesitate? What do they compare it with? What does their coffee routine look like?
Those answers became a value map: the brand's benefits matched against what each audience actually needs. Not every benefit makes the cut. A benefit the customer does not care about weakens the message, even when it is objectively true. The workshop is where we decide what stays.
"It wasn't just: okay, this is how it's going to look, the layout, let's program, go. It started with the question: who is your customer? How do we build a communication strategy that gets people from entering the website to the checkout, and to becoming lifelong customers? Only then: how does the technology fit that?"
Jarek Ziółkowski, co-owner
Every design decision came from the strategy and landed in one of three layers.
Communication. Content and graphics. The brothers have a strong instinct for words. We added an outside eye, less conditioned by the business, to pull out the strongest values and phrase them in their customers' language.
Visual design. Every ecommerce has two forces: the business and the customer. We believe they can be connected, and visual design is where that happens.
Structure. Every store needs a home page, categories, product pages, a cart and a checkout. What goes on those pages is less obvious. We mapped the customer's path through each of them, so the structure leads people by the hand and gives them what they need at each step.
When the first screens appeared, the brothers felt the store was right for their customers. They also felt it was right for them as a brand.
Specialty drinkers want change: new origins, new roasteries, details about water and brewing. Premium buyers want a reliable starting point. Business clients follow their own logic. Each group needed its own way in.
B2B was simple to start. Instead of a single "wholesale" page, we built dedicated landing pages for specific business groups, such as cafés and offices. Each group values different things. A café needs its espresso to be available without breaks. An office needs a team that is happy with the coffee. We now show this pattern to other clients: segment your B2B pages the same way you segment consumers.
During Ecommerce Growth, B2B moved into the store itself. We configured a flexible module for group and individual terms: dedicated discounts, logistics thresholds, and visibility of variants and order options matched to each group or client. Every buyer sees what they actually need, with less noise. A store that once served only consumers now handles B2B and B2C in one place.
Subscriptions arrived with the redesign. We launched them with a few fixed coffee sets, and they worked. They built a loyal group of fans and the brand's first base of regular subscribers.
Over time, the format hit a ceiling. It lacked flexibility. In 2026 we rebuilt the subscription model, and subscriptions have grown by 30% since.
Both decisions were right. Launching something the brand had never offered starts with a hypothesis. Hypotheses get tested, improved and replaced. The current model is a hypothesis too, and in a quarter, a year or two we may find a better one.
The strategy included a short quiz. It asked customers what they like: sweeter or stronger, with milk or without, how they brew. Based on the answers, the store suggested better-matched coffees.
We built it and launched it. A clear minority used it, and it got in the way more than it helped. So we removed it.
In hindsight, we underestimated the audience. These customers know what they are looking for. They like to read, choose and test on their own. "Blind coffee" fits them much better: rare, hard-to-get beans picked by the brothers, which usually appear in the store once and never join the regular range.
After launch, we stayed on for technical support and updates. It soon became clear that this was too little. The brothers worked with a performance marketing agency, yet nobody looked after the effectiveness of the store itself. Ecommerce Growth fills exactly that gap.
Bracia Ziółkowscy were one of our three pioneering clients for the service. Its current shape grew out of this collaboration.
Today it runs on a simple rhythm. Every two weeks we meet over the data. In between, we are available five days a week. The brothers bring ideas, questions and doubts. We filter them, challenge them and find a way forward. Each idea goes into the backlog, onto the agenda for the next call, or gets dropped so it stops taking up headspace.
"With Damian, we have a person and a kind of a friend. I call him your ecommerce friend. He helps you ask: okay, how do all those things fit together?"
Jarek Ziółkowski, co-owner
The climb from 5.6% to 7.2% is the sum of many small changes that support each other. Some of them are tiny.
Reading the data, we spotted an opportunity in the free-shipping threshold. Adjusting it was simple to implement. It lifted sales by about 7% in a comparable period.
Other changes need a test. We A/B tested a new product card. Overall, the result was a tie. For one specific group of customers, the new card had a clear advantage, so we rolled it out. Over the longer run, the change lines up with the rise in conversion, and we believe it contributed to it.
Email marketing came in with the redesign. During Ecommerce Growth, it grew into marketing automation in Klaviyo, deeply integrated with the store.
Besides collecting product and store reviews, five active flows have generated hundreds of additional orders. Automation supports conversion and retention, and it cuts the number of abandoned carts.
Ad platforms need Google tools, and that is hard to avoid. For our own analytics, we rely on Plausible and Metorik. Their integrations and the way they collect data give us figures we trust.
At the micro level, we see real traffic, real conversion and how customers move through the purchase path: how far they get and where they drop off. At the macro level, we see lifetime value, margins and growth potential. We segment faster and can model how specific groups behave over time. Less noise, better decisions.
We review the data in two-week windows. Conversion moves: some periods dip slightly below 6%, others go above 9%. The numbers in this case study are monthly averages. When the brand tested new traffic sources, conversion sometimes dropped for a while. Part of our role was watching those campaigns and cushioning the impact.
"We've been working with different agencies: Meta agencies, Google Ads agencies, search engine optimization, social media agencies. Everybody wants to say: hey, try this, and it's going to be perfect for your business. But it's not a coherent system."
"Why would you need more traffic if your website is not performing that well? Maybe it's better to direct your resources to the website and make it convert better. Then the same traffic is much more money for you in terms of sales."
"Right now, as an ecommerce owner, I cannot imagine working without this."
Jarek Ziółkowski, co-owner of Bracia Ziółkowscy
Conversion more than doubled, from 3.3% to 7.2%. B2B sales moved into the store. Subscriptions grew by 30%. Customers stay longer and are worth more over time.
Group and individual terms make B2B ordering easier for both sides. Automation takes over work that used to need attention. One partner looks at the whole store, instead of several vendors looking at separate pieces.
The backlog is full. We keep testing changes around conversion, retention, average order value and abandoned carts, and we keep automating operations.
Beyond the numbers, here is what working with us meant for Bracia Ziółkowscy.
The gap between 5.6% and 7.2% is what happened after launch. If your store went live and then stood still, the Ecommerce Growth Program is built for exactly that moment.
