The Challenge
Solid Gold Pet has been making holistic pet nutrition since 1974. That is not a marketing claim. It is a fifty-year track record of formulating dog and cat food from whole ingredients with a specific nutritional philosophy, well before "clean label" became a category buzzword. The brand's credibility is built on what goes into the bag.
The problem was that none of that came through online.
Like many heritage brands that expanded into DTC, Solid Gold's Shopify store had grown organically rather than by design. The subscription experience did not reflect how pet owners actually buy. A customer trying to set up auto-delivery for a 70-pound German Shepherd and one for a 12-pound tabby needed to figure out cadence on their own; the site gave them a standard interval selector and left the rest to guesswork. The ingredient story, which is a legitimate competitive advantage against mainstream pet food brands, was scattered across pages that required a customer to work for the information. Loyalty existed as a concept but not as a system.
Solid Gold is a brand managed by HH Global. When it came time to find an agency for the rebuild, the selection was deliberate. As Grace Carpenter put it: "Each brand has specific needs, and we find that Softlimit aligns the best with Solid Gold."
The brief was specific: rebuild the storefront to perform for a DTC customer who is already loyal to the brand but needs the site to work as hard as the product does.
The Solution
Softlimit rebuilt Solid Gold Pet's Shopify storefront on the Softlimit Core Theme, with a mobile-first architecture designed around the three things a pet nutrition customer actually does: learns, subscribes, and reorders.
Subscription UX. The subscription experience was rebuilt on Ordergroove with a redesigned cadence selection UI. Where the old site presented a generic interval dropdown and left the choice to guesswork, the new experience makes delivery options visually legible and the selection more deliberate. Solid Gold's customer base spans large-breed dog owners buying 22-pound bags on 28-day cycles to cat owners on longer intervals; the UI needed to accommodate that range clearly, not average it into a single default. Subscription brands know that cadence mismatch -- delivery arriving too soon or too late -- is a primary driver of cancellations. The Ordergroove data post-launch shows the effect: the subscriber base grew 21% in the four months after go-live, with June 2026 producing the strongest new subscriber acquisition month since the program's initial launch in November 2025.
Ingredient storytelling as infrastructure. Solid Gold's competitive advantage is what goes into its formulas. Softlimit built that story into the architecture with Shopify Metaobjects for ingredients, trust icons, and FAQs. Rather than hard-coded content that requires a developer to update, the content team now manages a centralized library. A new ingredient story added once cascades to any PDP or editorial page that references it. The Ingredients page, Nutrient Boost guide, and supporting content pages were migrated and rebuilt to work as a connected content system, not a collection of isolated landing pages.
Build Their Bowl (native cross-sell). Pet nutrition is a natural multi-category purchase. A customer buying large-breed dry food is the right audience for toppers, air-dried supplements, and treats. Rather than layering on a third-party recommendation engine, Softlimit built the cross-sell logic directly into the Core Theme as a PDP module called Build Their Bowl. It presents complementary products as part of a feeding plan, not an upsell overlay. The architecture is native -- no additional app, no third-party JavaScript overhead, full control over presentation. Dry food buyers, who post the highest AOV in the store, account for the majority of post-launch revenue; dry food AOV runs more than 2x above wet food AOV, which is the clearest signal that multi-category basket behavior is working.
Loyalty, reviews, and shoppable content. LoyaltyLion was configured to support retention on a brand where the purchase cycle is regular and the customer base is already engaged. Tolstoy was integrated for shoppable video, giving the editorial team a format for ingredient education that converts. The account page was rebuilt as a Pet Profile and subscription hub that lets a customer see their active subscriptions, loyalty standing, and pet information in one place -- a brand touchpoint, not a transaction utility.
Design as the through-line. Eighty-four percent of sessions come from mobile. The functional architecture does not move the numbers without design that earns attention on a 6-inch screen. The PDP was rebuilt to surface the ingredient story at the point of consideration, not buried two taps down. The subscription selector was designed for thumb navigation, with cadence options presented in the context of the customer's pet rather than a generic interval dropdown. The Pet Profile account page and the Build Their Bowl module both serve the same design principle: make the brand's product knowledge feel like a service the customer receives, not information they have to find.
The build ran from a December 2025 kickoff through a May 13, 2026 go-live. QA thoroughness, not scope, was the reason for the additional time past the original April target; the team worked through two full QA rounds and a legal and regulatory content review before signing off on launch.
The Results
Four months after launch, the numbers show what the site was built to do. Subscription revenue grew 29% from the last full month on the old site to the first full month on the new site. The subscriber base grew 21% in the four months after go-live. June was the strongest new subscriber acquisition month since the program's initial rollout in November 2025.
Average order value was up 45% year-over-year in June. The Core Theme's Build Their Bowl cross-sell module moved buyers from single-category orders toward multi-category baskets. Dry food customers, the largest revenue category post-launch, post more than 2x the AOV of wet food buyers -- the clearest signal that those customers are adding a topper or supplement to the bag.
Eighty-four percent of sessions came from mobile. The redesigned PDP, the clearer subscription cadence UI, and the loyalty entry points were all built for that majority. Session volumes in summer 2026 were comparable to summer 2025; it was revenue per session that moved. That distinction matters for attribution: the site architecture, not just expanded marketing, was doing material work.
Post-launch questions to the Softlimit team were almost entirely operational. How to use the loyalty program, how to manage new collections. Not technical. The build held.
Case Study / Pet
