What If "Shop by Color" Was the Most Valuable Spot on Your Shopify Site?

Jay Myers
I'm really excited today because I don't know if those of everyone listening knows, ⁓ back in 2013 at bold, we, we launched a product options app that had this concept of a color swatch in it. It was a little bit primitive at the time.

That was 13 years ago. A lot of things have changed. We actually don't own the app anymore. Another company does. It's still running. It's great for a lot of things, but ⁓ color swatches were always a challenge and the it's such an important thing. In fact, I was doing a little bit of research before this episode and ⁓ over a third of people who shop have used some type of a visual search and more than half of people say that visual info matters more than the text on the page.

when they're shopping. But it's one of the top reasons. It's also one of the top reasons people return products is it's the wrong, not just the wrong size, but it's the wrong fit and it's the wrong color. So color isn't just an easy filter. It's something that helps increase conversion. It's something that helps reduce returns and it builds a better brand experience. And so I brought on the founders of Hoppin. I got Bridger and Carsen sitting here at chomping at the bit waiting to tell us all about it, but they have

created something that solves and bridges this gap of color. And I find it fascinating. I'm really excited to get into it. First of all, welcome to the show, gentlemen.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Thanks, Jay. Happy to be here.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah,

yeah, same.

Jay Myers
So

most stores have a color filter. Why did you guys build this?

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah, so color is among the most ubiquitous filters you're going to see in e-commerce. When you have a large catalog site, let's say you have over 150 products, you're going to need a way to filter down that data set or else people are just not going to see your entire catalog. So you end up latching on to search and filter and ⁓ people break things down by price or by size, by brand. ⁓ Color is among

the top three most prevalent filters you're going to see in e-commerce. And we saw an opportunity to take this thing that every site is using and dramatically improve it because we understand color in a different way.

Jay Myers
One of my pet peeves when I'm shopping is when stores have fancy names for colors like midnight sand or like sure you've probably seen them all even even you know denim which might be a color that's very subjective too right. ⁓ What was this also an attempt to solve a little bit that problem like if you're picking a color event by name versus.

Visually, I imagine that's a big conversion and returns challenge as well.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

Exactly. mean, people, can't really use a search bar to search for color in a very effective way because chances are the way you describe a specific color is not going to align with how the merchant has actually tagged that product. And if you're running, let's say it's like ⁓ a boutique shop or marketplace, you could have 10 different brands and they're all going to call the same product a different color. ⁓ One brand might call it maroon. One might call it wine. ⁓ You have all these different artistic names that are

Jay Myers
Right.

Yeah.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
⁓ more marketable names for the product, but when it comes to being like an actual filterable attribute, it's kind of useless. ⁓

Jay Myers
Yeah,

because in the back end, it's just a whole bunch of tags, just words that people tag a product of a certain color has actually nothing to do with what the color of a product actually is.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

Yeah, there's not really a universal alignment on how to name specific colors, and it varies by locale and geography and ⁓ just all kinds of factors.

Jay Myers
So, sorry, go ahead.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah,

like a lot of people, when they think of color names, they kind of jump to the generic red, orange, yellow, green. They might get a little more granular with like navy or light blue, but there are a lot of really interesting colors that people love and they might be like the trending colors these days, but they're still hard to describe.

there's a lot of like muted colors, especially, and oftentimes people dress more muted, but these color attributes, the descriptions are usually leaning more towards vibrant colors. And that's just not what everyone's looking for.

Jay Myers
And if you can't find a color on a site, I've had this where I've been shopping for a specific color of a shirt or something. And if it's not easy to find, I just, bounce. ⁓ I'm not gonna go sifting through thousands of skews.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Mm-hmm.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
So there's a problem that like every merchant goes through when they think about adding a color filter to their site. They can either take the generic route. They could add a yellow, blue, and green filter and just make it like a Crayola crayon box of colors. ⁓ Or they could get very specific. They could do light blue, medium blue, dark blue, and then they could break it down that way by every color. And then you end up with this list of like 50 different color filtering options that you have to go through.

And when you go to filter by a light blue, for instance, you end up excluding so many products that the end results, it might say like, here's three products. And so you end up with this dead end. It's a lot, there's a lot of dead ends in the shopping experience. That's one of the things that we've solved with this product. ⁓ But it also creates this nightmare for merchants to tag things. Cause like, how do you decide? Does this, is this light blue or is this medium blue? Cause a lot of products are going to fit right in the middle.

Jay Myers
Hmm.

Right.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
And

even when you have these generic categories, like even if you have green and blue, if you have a turquoise product, like where do you tag that? And then the shopper is thinking that they're thinking like, where am I going to look to find that product? And it's not just green and blue. Like every single color naturally blends into the next. There is no ⁓ border between colors. Like if you take the color orange and you keep darkening it, eventually it's going to become brown, right?

Jay Myers
Right.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It never

just switches. It's a slow, yeah.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Mm-hmm.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

And it's subjective, like when that decision, when it switches. And even with this, we're just talking about color as if products are just a single color. If you're looking at like sneakers, for instance, there's often multiple colors within those products, accent colors, details.

Jay Myers
Right.

I actually had that on my one of the questions I wanted to ask is how do you handle multi product sorry multi color products.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Even this.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah, the biggest thing ⁓ that we're doing differently is we take the guesswork out of this because we're not asking a merchant to go in and tag things by green or blue. We actually have this AI automated system that we built that can extract the colors directly from the product image. So it's able to identify and segment the exact product off the model in the background. And so we can extract a plethora of weighted color values. If it's a Hawaiian shirt, maybe it's 70 %

light blue with like 30 % little yellow accent colors throughout it. We're capturing all of that nuance. And so when you search with our color wheel, it's ranking based on the color distance to all the different colors within that product, as well as the weight of those colors.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah, and it's not even, it's not just for fashion either. Like artwork works great. So like even this piece behind me, know, it's like, how would you describe that? There are so many colors that exist within it. And so what's exciting is that ⁓ maybe you search this very specific, like that green up there, ⁓ it's still gonna show up. It might not be at the very top, but it's able to surface in a way that it never would have been able to.

Jay Myers
Interesting. So then.

Mmm.

Yeah.

My mind is going to so many potential options. don't make, maybe hop and does this. I, I, I, but if you have an existing, I don't know, piece of artwork or piece of clothing and you want to match it, there's potential for that as well too. I'd imagine. don't, I don't know if it, don't think it does that right now, but like down there, because you're indexing these colors, you, you could theoretically let someone take a picture with a phone or something and then exact match. Correct.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah, that's correct. That's, I mean, that's on our roadmap. But for now it's, so intuitive to be able to just touch a color on the wheel and yeah. And if you, and it's instant feedback, like if you select a brown and then you're like, wait a minute, that's slightly too green. Then you just shifted a little bit on the wheel to more of a reddish color and you find what you're looking for.

Jay Myers
Yeah.

Yeah, you visually see it.

Yeah. So I know you have it. I'd love to actually visually see it. So I know a lot of our listeners are on, on Apple or Spotify right now. ⁓ just before this episode, we started recording the guys showed me they've got, they can actually show how this works. So if you want to hop over to our YouTube channel and see how this actually works, you're welcome to, we'll kind of talk through it. I think you'll probably get it. But, ⁓ if you want to visually see, go to our YouTube channel, but show me.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

Jay Myers
Just how does this, like what does it look like for a shopper? I'd love to see that experience. And then how does a merchant maybe set this up in their backend?

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, so we cover so many different industries. So I'll show you a couple examples. But this is what's possible with sneakers. So this ⁓ is a large sneaker marketplace based in the Netherlands, actually. And you can see how with this experience using the wheel, you could just pinpoint exactly where your intent is. Like, do I want something that's more of like a gold color? ⁓ You could just dial in what you want. If you want a darker.

Jay Myers
Amazing.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
⁓ it's gonna, yeah, it's going to essentially rank things, ⁓ by distance. So it's going to show the closest matches near the top. And as you scroll down the page, it's going to get, ⁓ progressively less accurate in all directions. ⁓ so for instance, you know, I'll pick a kind of like a middle of the pack color, like a greenish Brown. And you could see how, as I get farther from that color on the wheel.

Jay Myers
That is so cool.

Hmm

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Now it's starting to venture into these analogous and harmonious colors. ⁓ Things that are doing with like a professional merchandiser, is what they would do, which is kind of curating these things that could ⁓ visually work well together.

Jay Myers
Mm-hmm.

Hmm interesting

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
So this is where we found, thinking of us as like a merchandising experience. This is where we're finding that it's increasing the checkout size by 1.6 times across all of our brands. That's like the group average and a 1.3 times average order value lift. Yeah. So.

Jay Myers
Wow.

That's insane. When

someone uses the, when they shop by color, their checkout size on average is 60 % higher.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Mm-hmm.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah, well, when they shop by color with infinite color search. Yeah.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
That's right. Yeah. With our wheel. ⁓

Jay Myers
Correct, correct, correct,

yes.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah. And we're finding a 3.5 times conversion rate lift relative to the rest of their site through the wheel. So again, people are able to find exactly what they're looking for. I mean, think about how hard it would have been to search across nearly 4,000 products to find all of these. And then to have the confidence that, you know, maybe I like this shoe, but I actually really like this design a little bit more.

Jay Myers
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
to be

able to kind of comparatively shop within a site, this makes that much more natural.

Jay Myers
Mm-hmm.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
I think one of the most exciting aspects of this is that we're essentially introducing full personalization to every single shopper without having any kind of prior data on them because they're telling us exactly what they want. And so they're actually giving us data as to what the customers are shopping, what they're buying. ⁓ But it's not like we need to learn from them. They just tell us immediately what they're looking for.

Jay Myers
There's.

Right.

Right. Is there any type of feedback to the merchant on colors being searched for that don't have results? I don't know, maybe they want to add that color.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
That's what's so exciting about this is brands have never had access to the exact colors that shoppers are looking for. I mean, down to the hex code. Like to be able to see that, yeah. So to be able to see that in real time and also to be able to see that maybe someone's searching for a specific shade of teal, ⁓ but they don't have any products in that. Like we're able to actually plot three-dimensionally every single product in their entire catalog ⁓ by color and then map those discrepancies.

Jay Myers
Right, it's only what's on the list.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Mm-hmm.

Jay Myers
Hmm

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
to what people are actually searching. So we can point out that, you know, every brand has their focus. ⁓ Like traditionally, like fashion brands, they might have more of like a warm to cool access. Like you could see that when you actually analyze their product catalog. ⁓ And they may have little accents here, like a touch of neon green, touch of purple, but they're going to have ⁓ like their strength, their ⁓ color swatches that they do better than anyone else. And so

Jay Myers
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
⁓ We're able to point that out in a much more clear way.

Jay Myers
⁓ Now, what does it look like? What's the experience for a merchant? If I install this, does it just scan my products or do I have to do any work to index all the products, tag things or what's that look like?

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
So we had our own experience running a marketplace, working with a lot of different brands. We know how busy brands are. So we made it a priority from the very beginning to have just the most seamless integration we could think of. ⁓ So we fully automate the color tagging process, like I mentioned, with the AI. So after they install and improve the subscription, we could go through about 1,500 products in an hour. And we just go through the whole catalog. And once that's ready, they could launch it on their site.

And so we found a couple seamless ways to integrate. ⁓ One of them, this is a very kind of creative approach here. I'll screen share again. We took inspiration from the whole chat widget type apps out there, where we came up with this idea to do essentially this floating discovery tool. So this search color widget, this is an optional integration we have. And when you click on that,

Jay Myers
Hmm.

Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
it takes you right to the experience. And it remembers what you last searched and where you were scrolled within that. So I could click on a product, go to the product page, and then could just jump right back into this. It's a very useful experience, especially on mobile devices.

Jay Myers
Hmm.

that's so cool.

I went to was it spider surfboards before this there. I saw one of your clients. So I checked out their site and I saw that too. Like it's such a fun way to shop too. Like I picked a color and I saw all the gear and clothing and everything they had in that. And it made me think like, Oh, what if I just moved it a little bit this way? And what I was like, I can, I can experience products so much faster than I would by clicking through collections. Like it's like dialing.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Mm-hmm.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

Jay Myers
I don't know, it was fun. As a customer, it was a fun shopping experience.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah, it's a lot of fun.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah, it's like iterative.

kind of, it's experimental too in a sense, but it's also, it's like a fun surprise because never before have you been able to just like match all of these like-minded products. ⁓ So there's like a level of satisfaction when you hit the results. It's almost like a mini dopamine hit.

Jay Myers
Right.

Yeah.

Totally, yeah, you're sliding the color thing, you're clicking this and you're seeing everything change as like the products that are available in that color. like, you don't, you will, I guarantee you just, discover more products and I, you probably stay on the site longer too, because I don't know if you have that data, but the session length of a shopper, I bet you is higher. Cause you're, if I click on one color, I'm almost guaranteed I'm gonna slide it over and.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Jay Myers
click on some more colors and see what's available. Do you know that data on session length?

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Mm-hmm.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
I mean, you can guarantee

people are going to be more loyal to a site where the discovery is easy. If you have broken filters, you're going to bounce and go to a better site. ⁓ So there's a loyalty aspect that keeps people there longer and coming back. But going back to the integration options, we also have the ability to link to that color search overlay ⁓ through buttons across the site. So the most popular option we see

Jay Myers
Yeah. Right.

Yeah.

Okay. Okay.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
is brands will add a dedicated shop by color page within their header. ⁓ So I'll jump back into ⁓ our partner, Natalie Martin here. So you could see that this is a brand that they've always had this shop by print section in the header. Now they have shop by color. When you click on that, it just launches the overlay experience. So it takes people directly where they're already shopping.

Jay Myers
Mmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yep. Yeah.

Amazing.

Yeah, that's amazing. Now, does a merchant need to have like these product images I see there were very clean, consistent background. Does it work on lifestyle photos where the background is messy, they're outside or at a coffee shop and there's like a whole bunch of stuff going on? Or does it need to be a specific type of a photo?

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

Yeah. So our AI actually, it reads the product title and description. So it can take all of these words. Like let's say they're describing a UV protected lens with a retrofit and maybe they don't use the word sunglasses anywhere, but like our AI can piece it together and understand that that's what it should identify. So then it's able to draw a bounding box around that product within the image and just segment those pixels. So it could be an environment shot.

Jay Myers
Mmm.

Amazing.

It's amazing.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
⁓

Jay Myers
Yeah.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Ideally, you do want to photograph it in a way that's going to accurately represent the color, but that's in their best interest. Otherwise, they're going to get more returns if they're just misrepresenting the color.

Jay Myers
Right. And if it accidentally picks up the wrong thing for some reason, can a merchant go in and adjust?

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah, we're able to reprocess things and we always keep a close eye on the results.

Jay Myers
Okay.

Yeah, amazing. So how about like nuanced colors that are, I guess it does. There is no such thing as a nuanced color. It's the whole spectrum. That's the, yeah. Like if a color is a certain shade or faded or, yeah, I don't know, but yeah.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah, it actually thrives in that sort of ⁓ environment.

⁓ you know, a lot of these really tough to describe colors, like even this shirt is sort of like a slightly purpley kind of charcoal. ⁓ So to be able to touch that on the wheel and you see the results, it's unlike anything you've tried before.

Jay Myers
Right. And what's the experience like on mobile just out of curiosity?

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
It's about the same. So it's that same overlay experience. Yeah. Yeah, so you can hold it. Carson can show you but.

Jay Myers
Can you dial with your thumb the color? And OK, yeah.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Here, I'll pull it up

right here. essentially, we got a little bar right there. You tap on that. It brings up the wheel. You make your adjustment, and then tap to search, and there you go. And then if you were to tap on the product, goes right to the item page, you got the widget or the header collection, brings you right back into it. yeah, so we.

Jay Myers
Yep. Yep.

Okay, so similar.

and then it brings up your colors. Amazing.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
You know, we tried to make this as intuitive of a product as possible so that someone can use it if they're five years old or they could use it if they're 90 years old, you know? Yeah. Yeah. ⁓

Jay Myers
That's always the test, right? The drunk grandma test.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

Jay Myers
Yeah. Now, obviously, clothing is the top thing comes to mind as like a surefire win would do well with this, but you mentioned artwork. That makes a lot of sense. Are there other verticals that you've seen install this that have surprised you and you've gone, oh, that's a great use for it, or other areas that you didn't originally inspect?

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah, for sure.

I so like when we started this, we had originally designed it with fashion in mind. Like you said, that's like an obvious decision. ⁓ We're both into fashion. So we personally have experienced bad color filters and wanted a better solution. ⁓ But as we were building this, we knew that color is universal. know, like everyone's, most people see color in the same way. And so, ⁓

Jay Myers
Hmm.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
It's applicable to home decor. It's applicable to like wallpaper, photography, art, and one that was really interesting to us and like kind of surprised us at how effective it is our ⁓ material sites. So think about sites that sell a single product like paper or yarn. For example, we have, think five or six yarn sites. And for the shoppers there, when every single product is the same,

Jay Myers
Mmm.

Mmm.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
the differentiator is the color. And it's the job of these businesses to essentially cover every single color because they're catering to artists. And so what we're finding is that these brands are just absolutely killing it with the color search. Everyone's using it because it's just the most effective way to navigate their website.

Jay Myers
Totally.

And at the end of the day, that's like, if I'm buying yarn, I'm not even reading the description. I'm just looking for a color. Like, that's it.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah, exactly. And especially if you're

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
a returning customer, you know the product, you just need to re-app on certain colors, like you just dial it in and add to cart. So yeah, it's pretty exciting.

Jay Myers
Yeah.

Does the merchant get any metrics ⁓ in terms of ⁓ like a sales assisted by a color search or engagement with the widget, how much it's being used or ⁓ you probably can see that in your back end, but does the merchant know any of that?

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
We do individual case studies with brands. Like, you know, we're early on, so we haven't built out that massive infrastructure of providing those insights in real time. ⁓ But we always surprise our brands. Like, usually after they install, we'll give them a visual of all of their product colors mapped out so they could see exactly how much ⁓ they have in a specific color. And that's not even something they know when they install our app.

Jay Myers
Yeah. Like I just feel you're sitting on so much data where I would love to see the, ⁓ well, first of all, 29 % of all sales started with a color search and this was the most popular color. The, the best complimentary color for this might be this, or just like, I think from a merchandising standpoint, you have a lot of data. I mean, that could be a potential even more value down the road.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Mm-hmm.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, we've

had these one-on-one team ⁓ calls where we discuss ⁓ the results that we're seeing. And we've met with the designers behind a brand to be able to point out, this is where there's demand in this color range. And it gets them thinking and sometimes even acting on that data and producing product, new colorways in that range.

Jay Myers
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, that would be one of the biggest insights for me because like you said before, if you're just picking from a drop down, you don't know that they actually want a slightly different shade or and in fashion, I'm not huge into fashion, but I know that colors are nuanced. Like my wife and daughter will tell me that like certain shades are in of a color one year or like past a pastel blue, not a dark blue or not. And know, like it's even down to the shade like

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Mm-hmm.

Jay Myers
So that would never come through in drop downs. Yeah. Yeah. And you have.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
yeah.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
It's very granular.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
I think a lot of people

understand that when they think about interior design. Like if you've ever painted a house, you're not just gonna pick up, well, for one, you're not deciding between green or blue. You're deciding between five different shades of blue. Like you've already clued in on like what you're looking for generally. And then you take a bunch of swatches, you paint them on the wall, and you look at it in different lighting additions. You're like, that's the one I want. So people think that way about fashion too.

Jay Myers
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
⁓ especially ⁓ stylists will find this to be a huge time saver because they might spend hours looking for a particular shade of olive green going to a lot of different websites. If they knew that there was a site that allowed you to see that color they're looking for immediately, then that's going to be their go-to site.

Jay Myers
Mm-hmm.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
And another thing that's, think, really surprising is, with these stylists, it's not even necessarily them searching for what people would consider color, but they're looking for a very specific kind of off white or a very specific kind of black and black, not all blacks are black colors are the same. It's like, like Bridger was saying earlier with his shirt, ⁓ someone who doesn't really think in terms of color, they might just say he's wearing a black shirt, but you hold his shirt up next to your shirt, Jay, and.

Jay Myers
Hmm. Hmm.

This is black, come on. ⁓

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
His is very, it's yeah, yours is a much darker

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
black. And there's a lot of nuance to not only the lightness of the black, but how much pigment exists within that black. Like Bridger's carries more pigment ⁓ and also just the hue. Like some blacks shift towards blue. And when a stylist is merchandising a fit and they're trying to find a very specific kind of black, they might need a black that actually leans more towards a green. And like that is literally the difference maker.

Jay Myers
Right.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
between buying a shirt or not.

Jay Myers
Yeah, I have a question. I don't know if the app does this, but if not put it in as a feature request for me. But the first thing I did when I went on a site and I clicked the color, I went on that surf was a spider surf site. I think it was and and I found this color. I kind of liked and I saw they had some gear and I was like, oh, this is awesome. And I actually liked the products. And then it's like, I want to save this color. And does that exist? For the customer.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Mm-hmm.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

Yeah, we've,

not currently, but we've concepted almost like a history bar, being able to go back to that. Yeah.

Jay Myers
Okay, yeah, like I like if I

now shop on another site rather than copying the hex code, I don't think that's good even is visibly available to the customer, right? They just see the color bill. Yeah. So to save it, first of all, as a customer, I would love that because then I could ⁓ shop another site the exact same tone and then but also ⁓ identify me as a customer who saved that and then for the merchant when they

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
No.

Yeah.

Jay Myers
release products to be able to notify me in some way that six new products are available in your saved color or within a range of the saved color, right? Like obviously that if it's going to be a hex key, it's, but yeah. Yeah.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

course.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
For sure.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah, there's

16.7 million unique RGB colors. you got to have some tolerance there.

Jay Myers
Yeah, so yeah. Yeah. Like.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
⁓ So

that I think that's a really interesting point and it's something we've been talking about for a few years now ⁓ I fully agree I think saving colors is incredibly useful because you know certain people they only they have a limited color palette They know what they like if they could shortcut straight to that. That's a great user experience ⁓ I think one of one of the main challenges is ⁓ There there isn't like a unified account across every single website

Jay Myers
Mm-hmm.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
And so you would essentially have to create like a separate account for it to save per Shopify store. ⁓ You know, one day when we introduce the ultimate aggregator of every website using infinite color search, you'll be able to create an account there and essentially save your favorite colors across your favorite stores.

Jay Myers
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it would maybe also create a bit of ⁓ pull demand from customers, right? So like if, if there's push demand where you're pushing the product to a merchant, but also pull would be if I save my color and I shop on this site and shop on this site, and now I go to a site that doesn't have Hopin, I'm like, ⁓ I might, I might message him. Hey, I want, can you guys get Hopin? Cause I got my color profile saved. I wish I could just pick it. And then when, when, when, if customers can start demanding it.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Mm-hmm.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

Jay Myers
Then then you've games over you guys win.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
We find a lot of

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Mm-hmm.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
partners discover us through other sites. In our color wheel, it's almost like our second logo. It's so recognizable. ⁓ So once a user has tried it, they have this trust. They know it works well. So when they see it on another site, if they see that floating search color widget, chances are they're going to use it. So I think the usage is going to increase over time.

Jay Myers
Yeah.

Right. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Totally. Okay, I a few rapid fire questions. want to fire your way. ⁓ What's the worst color filter implementation you've seen on Shopify stores?

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
So I'd say the worst ones are kind of generated automatically where they essentially go through every product in the catalog and they look at all the unique color variant names and then they just throw that together in like a menu. So you end up seeing like 10 different swatches that are all blue, but they're like typed out slightly differently.

Jay Myers
Mm-hmm.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
We genuinely see that pretty frequently, even on big sites. And the most common error we see is brands, just stop tagging things by color. After a certain while, they might keep it up for a little bit when they first launch their color filter, but that extra manual step is just too much for a lot of brands. so even massive sites like Nordstrom, I'd click on blue and I know it's not showing me every single product that's blue.

Jay Myers
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Like I know they're

Jay Myers
Mm-hmm.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
missing things. So that is something we just see across the board.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
I've got two pretty ⁓ different examples of bad color filtering that I've experienced on a lot of sites. ⁓ One is the massive grid of circles. I've seen, there'll be a grid of say 10 by 15 circles, 150 circles with all these different nuanced colors, but they're kind of like randomly, they're not organized. So they're randomly placed within that grid ⁓ and they're

crazy filter down. So if you click on one, you might see like one product. And so that is just a really frustrating experience because then you have to, your eyes are just bouncing all over the place trying to find the color you want. And then the second is kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum, which is there are no colors. It's literally a long list of words that might have 25 different color names. And I have to go and read manually down the list and try to

not only read the word, but then translate that word into what I think that color is gonna be before I even click on that. ⁓ So there's a lot of approaches.

Jay Myers
Yeah. I.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
And Jay, Jay,

this is the crazy part. So a lot of these big brands, they don't have very good color filters. And what they end up seeing is they're not seeing a whole lot of people shop by color. And they don't really think that that reason is because their color filters don't work very well. If they had a better experience, then there could be a lot more people shopping by color within their site. That is when the battles that we're up against as a company is like,

Jay Myers
Mm-hmm.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
we are doing something significantly better than how it's been done before. And so, you we meet these brands sometimes where they get this like warped perspective on what their customers actually want because they don't currently have an experience that's anywhere close to what we have.

Jay Myers
The possibilities just kind of my mind keeps going to like you probably also have the data on people who buy a certain color also by this color. Like I'm just thinking of the person that's like, well, I only wear pastels or I only wear this tone or I this is my color palette. Like if I buy a certain color. It's like Amazon, if you go and you search in Amazon and you search for an HDMI cable.

It's not going to be all HDMI cables. The first three or four results will be an HDMI cable. And then the next thing will be like maybe a, maybe an H like a USB hub because people also buy that when they're buying an HDMI cable or something else. It's like similar products, but you're not going to see 20 HDMI cables all in a roll because there's an aspect of discovery. I feel like color is that way too. There's there's, if you are a certain palette having

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jay Myers
⁓ In the search results like here's all the color ⁓ other colors that fit with this palette would be really interesting to have as another section and then you know, you start going out into the other ones but like the foundation for What you've built is amazing. I just my mind just always keeps going to these opportunities

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

Yeah, the data, I'd

love to dive into the data side too, ⁓ but there are ways to predict what colors people want. ⁓ Even attributes like eye color, like I have green eyes and like a deep forest green is like my favorite color. ⁓ Everyone has specific colors that are their favorite colors. And we're giving brands the opportunity to ask their customers, what is your favorite color? Tell us the exact thing and we'll show you products that match it. ⁓

Jay Myers
Mm-hmm.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Also been able to see what happens when people search multiple colors, because our wheel allows for that. It even allows for multiple weights. So let's say I want a sneaker that's 90 % black with a 10 % yellow accent color. You could dial that in and see those results. And we've been able to recognize these interesting cultural moments in real time. Do you watch show Stranger Things? Yeah. So in the last

Jay Myers
Yeah.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Four episodes, the character Elle, no spoilers, but she's wearing a body glove wetsuit. A body glove is a partner of ours. And what's been so interesting when that happened, when those episodes aired, we could see in real time that customers were going into the wheel and they were searching for the exact colors in this wetsuit here. Look at that. So they were searching a two-tone match. They were actually searching red.

Jay Myers
I didn't see the last season though, but yeah. Okay, okay.

amazing.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
mixed with that light blue, bluish green color. And so that type of insight, like to be able to see that people are actually searching for that two-tone combo, 30 % of the searches that actually happened through our wheel are two-color searches. And 5 % are weighted. So that's like, you know, looking for 30%, one color, 70 % and up.

Jay Myers
That's so cool.

Hmm.

That is so interesting.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
The other thing I'd love to dive into, and this is where I think the industry is just misunderstanding how color actually works. Color is a three-dimensional data point. So you essentially have this XY plane, which is the chroma. You have a warm to cool access and a green to magenta access. And then the Z space is the lightness. So as it goes up, it gets lighter and down, gets darker. So you can actually plot any product three-dimensionally within that space.

So that's how you should understand color. Now you can see how one color just naturally flows to the next. There aren't these rigid borders between color, like green or blue or brown. That doesn't really exist here. It's just sort of like this construct that we've all agreed on for a couple of decades now. But it's really not the right way to handle color. ⁓ What you're seeing here is an actual product catalog from one of our partners.

Jay Myers
Yes.

This is so cool to be able to look at this and see where the density of search, that's what this is, right? Where when people click, this would be the density of search in that area.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Mm-hmm.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
This is actually product color. So this isn't even the searches. These are the products. Yeah. ⁓ And what's amazing about this is, you know, this is ⁓ one of our best partners. They had a 67 times ROI. So we generated a lot of sales for them. And you could see they don't even color. They don't even cover every possible color in the spectrum. They clearly have certain colors they do better in. ⁓

Jay Myers
okay, this is just what they have.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
But because our system is able to essentially pull the closest match, we get them to what they're looking for a lot closer. One of the things that, uh-huh.

Jay Myers
Yeah.

Well, I was going to say, and then they, the, the, the question just becomes then from a branding standpoint, do they want to stay within that color spectrum or they want to fill all the colors? Like it's awesome when you go on a site and you can slide it anywhere. I went in a couple and there's products in all the colors. I'm, I think that's good, but maybe some brands want to say like, no, we play in this range of color. So at least they then can see like, there's a gap.

here, product gap in this spot.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah,

for sure. mean, not every brand wants to be a rainbow brand. That's totally fair. But I think what's really interesting is that these searches can influence future collections. And so if a brand is already looking to branch out at another color within their catalog, ⁓ this could help influence that decision and with confidence that this is actually something that people are searching for.

So it's just really, regardless whether they capitalize on this data or not, it's still useful.

Jay Myers
So cool. So cool. Well, I've learned a ton. else do you want our listeners to know about color? I feel like I've learned. I did not know it was three dimensional. ⁓ What do you want someone listening to know who thinks ⁓ color, they can go on my site. I got a color picker. got, it's the most important message you have to share.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
haha

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah ⁓

Well.

People need to wake up to the idea that color is a significant driver of sales. And big brands recognize this to some extent. Like if you go to Nike's website, their color filter is above price and size. That's where they rank it in terms, like the actual order on the page. Adidas has an actual shop by color button in their header. And of course it just takes you to a page where you could do green or blue or yellow. You know, it's really generic. It's not like what we're doing, but

Jay Myers
Hmm. Wow.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
It says something when these billion dollar companies are ⁓ putting an emphasis on color. Now imagine if they actually had the data that we're providing. ⁓ So color is much more than meets the eye. ⁓ I think it could be the biggest value in lock 2026. And we're new as a company. We've been out as an app for a year now. And Carson and I recently got recognized.

on the Forbes 30 under 30 list for what we're doing in the space. ⁓ Thank you. Yeah, so, you know, we're looking to have early conversations. ⁓ You know, if you're listening and you work with a Shopify agency and you haven't had a meeting with us, go book some time in our calendar, because, you know, we're doing personal walk-throughs at this stage with brands.

Jay Myers
I saw that, that's huge.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Mm-hmm.

Jay Myers
Amazing. I will make sure to include details on that in the show notes. Is it just to your website or do you want to share a link or what should I put in the show notes for that?

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Hoppin.com has a get started page and you can book calls with us. Yeah.

Jay Myers
And then if you go there,

they can, okay, amazing. Awesome. ⁓ Last thing, where are you most active on social? If people are like, I'm fascinated about this. I wanna follow these guys on social. Where are you hanging out?

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
I'd say right now, LinkedIn for sure. I try to share ⁓ about four days a week. So a lot of it is more either design focused or color focused, talking about our product, exciting new partnerships, ⁓ insights that we're driving from our partners. ⁓ So yeah, Carson Hart on LinkedIn, Bridger Hart on LinkedIn.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Jay Myers
Amazing.

I don't believe I'm aware of a other than you guys now, a thought leader in the space of color for commerce. Like it's something that I think has been overlooked and, ⁓ you know, the more like the data that you shared there showing that model, I think was fascinating and more information like that. I think brands would just eat up. So, ⁓ for those listening, definitely give them a follow. Cause I think this, I think you're right. I think,

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

Jay Myers
The fact that Nike and Adidas have, they know that when customers land on their site, that's what they're looking for. Like there's a, there's a reason that's in their top nav. It's like arguably the most precious spot on a website. I often say that the only thing that should go in a top nav are things that lead to money, like not your about us page, not your, put that all in the footer. So if that's in the top nav, search by color leads to money. So that's the.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Mm-hmm.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah. And Jay,

we want to be there too. We want to be on Nike's site. So we're, meeting with those large enterprise companies right now, even though our focus is the Shopify app, we also are building out this custom solution. So headless stores and these massive enterprise companies would be able to integrate alongside their existing search and filters or launch their own dedicated Shopify cover page. I think the, marketing angle of this is something we haven't even touched on in this call, but when brands launch this on their site.

they make posts about it. actually drive traffic to their site just so people could go try it out. And so that's one of the first things we recommend when a brand launches this is it would be a mistake not to announce this in some fashion to your audience. Because I mean, how often do you have a new feature in e-commerce that's like really unique and exciting to go try out? There's a lot of like incredibly smart optimization tricks in our industry, but there aren't too many like

Jay Myers
Hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
experiences that really are eye-catching like this.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

mean, oftentimes they're these site improvements are behind the scenes or it might not be something they want to talk about because, know, like Bridger says, they're, um, they're, they're just like some kind of potential psychology trick, uh, subtle ways to improve sites or layouts or upselling. But for us, it's like, we're, we're a B2B business, but we're selling a consumer facing product. And this product is like,

visually exciting. It's something that does really well in social and has potential for ⁓ pretty big virality if partnered with the right brand.

Jay Myers
Yeah.

I think it's such a organic, natural way to drive someone to your site that's not a promo or a sale or anything. It's just like, would literally, I would send an email with the color wheel and just say, what color are you going to pick? Come pick a color and see, like, see, see what's out, see what, I don't know, whatever, right? Like just like, you're right. There is like a dopamine hit of like, I want to click that color and see what's, see what's there. Like, ⁓

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Mm-hmm.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Mm-hmm.

Jay Myers
huge opportunity to drive people to your store in a way that's just not more say marketing promotion, right? So I love it. So much opportunity. Well, this has been, this has been fascinating. I'm going to make sure I put all of this in the show notes and like any, everyone listening, definitely, definitely check out Hopin. It's live in the app store. put the link on the website, but it is in the Shopify app store as well too. But if someone's wants to learn more, go to Hopin and

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Mm-hmm. Awesome.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah.

Jay Myers
Click on contact and you're given live demos, you said. OK, well, let's keep these boys busy. Well, alright, thank you guys so much. This has been a ton of fun.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Mm-hmm.

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah, yeah, it's us. We're taking the calls.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah. ⁓

Bridger Hart (Hoppn)
Yeah. Thanks, Jay.

Yeah, great time. Thank you.

Carson Hart (Hoppn)
Thanks, Jay.