Lime Crime

Lime Crime

Express Yourself

Scaling up for a retail unicorn.
Industry
Beauty Beauty
Headquarters
Beauty LA
Loving
Beauty Scalability
Fav Tool
Beauty Releases

Booming cosmetics brand Lime Crime makes makeup for boys and girls who express themselves unapologetically. They embrace authenticity like few of today’s retailers do.



Headquartered in Los Angeles, the privately-owned online retailer grew in popularity on Livejournal back in 2008 where founder and CEO Doe Deere gained a loyal following. From there, Lime Crime became Instagram-famous with a fanbase now exceeding 3 million followers.

While experiencing windfalls of online sales, the digitally-native beauty brand faced a nightmare many high growth retailers face as they grow, a site crash.


No Time for Downtime


While every retailer would celebrate shattering single-day sales records, Lime Crime saw their website crash on their biggest sales day ever, Black Friday of 2015, on their previous ecommerce platform. Upwards of 15,000 orders were transacted, but the servers the platform used couldn’t handle the traffic volume resulting in the loss of sales and creating dissatisfied customers unable to make purchases.

When the in-house team at Lime Crime went to market to evaluate platforms, finding a stable and scalable system were must-haves. After replatforming to Workarea, 25,000 online orders were placed in a single day in May of 2017, which resulted in the largest sales day in Lime Crime history. 

In order to handle incredibly high traffic spikes and large order volumes for its customers, Workarea has a 99.98% uptime guarantee and is built with the most cutting-edge hosting and monitoring, image processing and redundancy technology.


“The release functionality is absolutely critical. You can see not just homepage changes, but you can click through and see your category page, your product detail page, rearrange product images on the PDP to make sure it’s the right flow. It really does allow you to have a comprehensive QA of the work you’re going to release.”



Chrissie Webster 
VP Ecommerce, Lime Crime



Create-A-Campaign in 3 Weeks


Supporting the launch of three new products across multiple categories for their makeup collection Mermaids, the sole ecommerce team member at Lime Crime used nearly every available tool in Workarea: responsive homepage content blocks, user-generated content, optimized image processor, in-grid content blocks, and curated category capabilities.

Knowing 70% of their site traffic comes from mobile, Lime Crime's digital campaign would only work if they could preview the sitewide changes they dreamt up and the items optimized for mobile shoppers. In order to pull this cohesive campaign off—and so the ecommerce director wouldn’t have to stay awake until midnight to launch it—Site Planner was tapped. Since the Site Planner scheduling tool within Workarea allows retailers to view all upcoming changes, the campaign’s components were dropped in to see how it would appear on mobile, tablet, and desktop.

In the end, Lime Crime loyalists and newcomers alike took to social media to express their delight, and a star category was born. From initial planning to execution, the holistic campaign was accomplished in three weeks by one person using Workarea.

As founder and CEO Doe Deere says, “Lime Crime is freedom to be you!” Today, Lime Crime is freed up to express themselves through their site. Fully supported by modern ecommerce features and functionality, the brand can finally be the unicorn online it was meant to be.

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