How we increased Fight Club’s CVR by 61% even in the most saturated market

BONUS: If you want to grow like Fight Club and increase your store’s CVR by at least 30%... Click here.

Introduction to Gamma Waves and Flight Club

When Flight Club first reached out to us at Gamma Waves (we were still called Sellry back then) in early 2019, I could see right away that we had something special on our hands.

Flight Club isn't just any sneaker store. They pioneered the whole sneaker consignment marketplace concept back in 2005, way before sneaker reselling became the huge industry it is today.

With their flagship stores in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, they'd built this incredible following among sneaker collectors and enthusiasts.

But here's the thing – while they were killing it in their physical stores, their online presence wasn't keeping up.

E-commerce had evolved rapidly, and new digital-first competitors were starting to eat into their market. Flight Club was at this critical turning point – they needed to evolve or risk becoming irrelevant.

At Gamma Waves, tackling these kinds of digital transformations is our bread and butter. We're not just tech people – we blend technical know-how with a deep focus on the human experience and making decisions based on real data.

What made this project particularly exciting was its scope. We weren't just tweaking a website.

Over six intense months, we rebuilt Flight Club's entire digital foundation while also creating a testing framework that would keep improving their results long after we finished our work.

The results speak for themselves: conversion rates up 61%, average order value increased by 30%, and ultimately, a successful merger with GOAT plus a $60 million investment round.

But numbers only tell part of the story. We helped Flight Club reclaim their leadership position in an increasingly competitive market and set them up for their next growth phase.

In this case study, I'll walk you through the challenges we tackled, our strategic approach, and the specific actions that drove these impressive outcomes.

Challenge

When we started working with Flight Club, they were dealing with a perfect storm of operational, technical, and market challenges that were seriously hampering their ability to compete online.

What made their situation especially tricky was how interconnected all these issues were – problems in one area were creating ripple effects throughout the business.

Inventory Complications

At the core of Flight Club's problems was a disconnect between their physical and online inventory systems.

As a consignment business handling thousands of unique items across three retail locations and their website, keeping accurate inventory was absolutely critical.

But their outdated systems couldn't provide real-time visibility across channels.

This was creating frustrating experiences for customers. Imagine finding those hard-to-find sneakers you've been hunting for online, placing an order, and then getting a message that they're actually out of stock. Each time this happened, it chipped away at customer trust.

The consignment model made this even trickier. Unlike regular retailers who own their inventory, Flight Club manages products for thousands of individual consignors.

They need to track not just what's in stock but who owns each pair and what their specific consignment terms are. Their legacy systems just weren't built to handle this complexity.

Poor Customer Experiences

These inventory headaches directly led to disappointing customer experiences, but that wasn't all.

Flight Club's website had evolved piecemeal over the years, resulting in a clunky, inconsistent user experience with lots of friction points.

Navigation was confusing, with too many clicks needed to reach product pages.

The search function couldn't handle how sneakerheads actually look for products – by colorway, release year, or collaboration details.

Mobile users, who made up a growing segment of their traffic, faced an especially difficult shopping journey.

Checkout was another major pain point. Payment processing was unreliable, especially for international customers who represented a significant growth opportunity.

Order confirmations were inconsistent, leaving customers in the dark about their purchases and generating unnecessary support tickets.

These experience issues were particularly damaging because they clashed with Flight Club's in-store reputation for excellent service and expertise.

The gap between their physical and digital brand experiences was undermining the premium positioning they'd worked so hard to build.

Too Many Manual Tasks Being Performed

Behind the scenes, Flight Club's team was drowning in manual work.

Staff spent hours each day reconciling inventory discrepancies between physical stores and the website.

Order processing required multiple steps across disconnected systems.

Website updates were bottlenecked through a single developer, creating delays in showcasing new inventory.

The payment processing system was especially problematic.

International transactions needed manual review and processing, creating delays for customers and tying up valuable team resources.

Even basic reporting required staff to pull and combine data from multiple systems to get a complete picture of business performance.

These inefficiencies weren't just increasing costs – they were preventing the team from focusing on strategic initiatives that could move the business forward.

Instead of enhancing customer experience or developing new features, talented team members were stuck doing maintenance just to keep things running.

Pressure from Competition

While Flight Club was struggling with these internal issues, the competitive landscape was rapidly evolving.

New digital-first marketplaces like StockX and GOAT were gaining traction with streamlined user experiences and sophisticated mobile apps.

Traditional retailers like Nike and Adidas were developing their own resale platforms.

Even social media was creating new channels for peer-to-peer sneaker sales.

These new competitors didn't have the technical baggage that Flight Club had accumulated as an early pioneer.

They were built from scratch for digital-first consumers, with seamless experiences across devices and sophisticated personalization features.

They could quickly iterate and refine their offerings based on customer feedback.

Flight Club's brand heritage and authentic connection to sneaker culture were still hugely valuable assets, but they needed a digital experience to match.

Without significant improvements to their technology and customer experience, they risked being overtaken by these nimbler competitors despite their stronger brand.

The stakes were high. Flight Club's leadership recognized they needed more than just small improvements – they needed a comprehensive digital transformation to solve their immediate operational problems while positioning them for long-term growth. That's where our partnership began.

Tactics

When we first engaged with Flight Club, they initially brought us in to audit their e-commerce platform.

But it quickly became clear that a more comprehensive approach was needed.

After we presented our findings, they expanded our role to cover a complete digital transformation – spanning technology infrastructure, user experience, and ongoing optimization.

Our approach balanced immediate fixes with longer-term strategic initiatives, all carefully orchestrated to minimize disruption to their ongoing business. Here's how we tackled this complex transformation:

A/B Test Planning

From day one, we knew that making changes to a beloved brand's digital presence came with significant risks alongside the potential rewards.

Rather than relying on gut feelings or general best practices, we built a robust testing framework that let us validate our assumptions with real customer data before fully implementing changes.

We started by mapping out key conversion funnels and identifying the highest-impact opportunities for improvement.

This meant analyzing existing analytics data and spotting areas with unusual drop-offs or friction.

For Flight Club, these included the search-to-product-page journey, the add-to-cart process, and the checkout experience.

With these priority areas identified, we developed a comprehensive testing roadmap that balanced quick wins with more fundamental experience improvements.

Each test was designed not just to measure conversion impact, but also to generate insights about customer preferences that could inform future improvements.

On the technical side, implementing this testing capability required significant backend work.

The legacy platform had no built-in A/B testing functionality, so we created a custom implementation that integrated with their existing analytics.

This gave Flight Club the ability to easily deploy, measure, and iterate on changes – capabilities that would prove valuable long after our initial work was done.

Stakeholder and Customer Interviews

Technical solutions alone wouldn't solve Flight Club's complex challenges.

We needed to deeply understand both the business context and customer expectations to design truly effective solutions.

We conducted structured interviews with key stakeholders across Flight Club's organization – from executive leadership to store associates handling customer service.

These conversations revealed critical insights about operational pain points, business priorities, and the nuanced ways that online and offline channels interacted.

On the customer side, we implemented a multi-faceted research approach. This included:

• Moderated usability sessions with existing customers across different segments (casual buyers, collectors, resellers)

• Intercept interviews at Flight Club's New York and Los Angeles stores to understand the crossover between physical and digital shoppers

• Analysis of customer service inquiries to identify recurring pain points and unmet needs

• Competitive shopping exercises to benchmark Flight Club's experience against emerging marketplace competitors

These research initiatives yielded invaluable insights that shaped our approach.

We discovered that sneaker enthusiasts shop in fundamentally different ways than typical e-commerce customers – often seeking specific rare items rather than browsing categories, and valuing detailed authentication information that wasn't prominently featured in the existing experience.

By combining stakeholder priorities with customer insights, we developed a transformation roadmap that balanced business objectives with genuine customer needs – creating the foundation for experiences that would drive both immediate conversion improvements and long-term loyalty.

BONUS: If you want to grow like Fight Club and increase your store’s CVR by at least 30%... click here.

Customer Journey Mapping

With rich stakeholder and customer insights in hand, we developed comprehensive journey maps that documented the existing experience across channels and highlighted opportunities for improvement.

These journey maps weren't abstract exercises – they were practical tools that guided our prioritization.

We mapped emotional highs and lows throughout the customer experience, connecting these to specific interaction points that could be enhanced through our transformation efforts.

For Flight Club's core audience of sneaker enthusiasts, we identified several critical moments that defined their relationship with the brand:

1. The Hunt - The thrill of searching for and discovering a coveted style in the right size and condition

2. The Authentication Moment - The reassurance that comes from knowing an item is genuine and accurately represented

3. The Acquisition - The satisfaction of successfully purchasing a sought-after item before others can claim it

4. The Celebration - The social capital of sharing a noteworthy addition to one's collection

Each of these moments presented specific opportunities to differentiate Flight Club's digital experience.

For example, we enhanced search functionality to support the hunting process, redesigned product detail pages to highlight authentication information, streamlined checkout to support rapid acquisition, and integrated social sharing capabilities to facilitate celebration.

By organizing our transformation efforts around these key journey moments, we ensured that technical improvements directly supported customers' emotional needs – creating experiences that resonated on both functional and emotional levels.

Data-driven Storytelling

For a brand with Flight Club's cultural significance, customer experience couldn't be reduced to just conversion optimization.

We needed to ensure that their digital presence told a compelling brand story while delivering on functional needs.

We approached this challenge through what we call "data-driven storytelling" – using customer insights to identify where and how brand narratives should be integrated into the experience.

This wasn't about adding superficial visual elements, but about authentically expressing Flight Club's unique perspective on sneaker culture at relevant points in the customer journey.

For example, our research showed that customers valued Flight Club's deep expertise and curation perspectives.

We created new content types that showcased this expertise – from detailed histories of iconic sneaker models to trending reports based on marketplace data.

These content elements were strategically integrated into the shopping experience, enhancing product pages and category browsing without getting in the way of conversion paths.

We also developed dynamic content capabilities that allowed Flight Club to quickly spotlight cultural moments relevant to the sneaker community.

When an athlete wore a noteworthy shoe during a game, or a limited release generated unusual marketplace activity, Flight Club could now feature this content prominently – demonstrating their cultural currency and authentic connection to the community.

These storytelling elements differentiated Flight Club from purely transactional marketplaces, reinforcing their position as cultural leaders rather than mere middlemen.

The approach proved particularly effective in driving organic social sharing and return visits – metrics that indicated deeper engagement beyond immediate transactions.

Test-and-iteration planning

Perhaps the most valuable long-term contribution of our partnership was establishing a sustainable methodology for continuous improvement.

Rather than delivering a static "finished" product, we implemented systems and processes that would allow Flight Club to constantly evolve their digital experience based on customer feedback and performance data.

This began with the technical infrastructure – implementing a flexible front-end architecture that allowed components to be updated independently without requiring full-site deployments.

We built modular systems rather than monolithic ones, enabling Flight Club to evolve specific experience elements as customer needs changed.

On the process side, we established regular optimization cycles with clear roles, responsibilities, and decision-making frameworks.

Each cycle followed a consistent pattern:

1. Hypothesis Generation - Using performance data to identify opportunities and develop specific, testable hypotheses about potential improvements

2. Prioritization - Evaluating hypotheses based on potential impact, implementation complexity, and alignment with strategic objectives

3. Test Design - Creating controlled experiments with clear success metrics and statistical validity

4. Implementation - Deploying tests to statistically significant traffic segments

5. Analysis - Evaluating results not just for win/loss outcomes, but for deeper insights about customer preferences

6. Scaling - Implementing successful changes more broadly while feeding new insights back into the hypothesis generation process

We trained Flight Club's team on this methodology and provided documentation, templates, and workshops to ensure they could continue the optimization process independently after our engagement concluded.

This commitment to sustainable improvement – rather than one-time solutions – proved particularly valuable as Flight Club navigated rapidly changing market conditions and customer expectations in the months and years following our initial engagement.

Results

The comprehensive transformation we led for Flight Club delivered exceptional results across multiple dimensions – from immediate performance improvements to long-term strategic positioning.

While the headline metrics are impressive in themselves, the real impact lies in how these improvements positioned Flight Club for their next phase of growth and ultimately contributed to their successful merger with GOAT.

61% Conversion Rate Increase

Perhaps the most dramatic immediate impact came in the form of conversion rate improvements.

Through our systematic optimization approach, we achieved a 61% increase in overall conversion rate – fundamentally changing the economics of Flight Club's digital business.

This improvement didn't come from a single silver-bullet solution, but rather from dozens of incremental enhancements across the customer journey.

Some of the most impactful changes included:

• Redesigned product detail pages that showcased authentication details, condition information, and sizing guidance more prominently

• Enhanced search functionality that better matched the way sneaker enthusiasts actually look for products

• Streamlined checkout flow that reduced form fields by 40% and implemented smart defaults based on customer history

• Improved mobile experience with touch-optimized interactions and appropriate visual hierarchy for smaller screens

• Enhanced product imagery that showed consistent, high-quality views from multiple angles

• What's particularly cool about these conversion improvements is that they happened while simultaneously increasing average order value – proving that we weren't simply making it easier to buy cheaper items, but actually enhancing the overall shopping experience in ways that built confidence and reduced purchase friction.

30% Increase in AOV

The 30% increase in average order value was a significant achievement for a marketplace already focused on premium products.

This improvement came through several strategic interventions:

• Enhanced merchandising of complementary products based on purchase and browsing history

• Implementation of "complete the look" functionality that showcased stylistically compatible items

• Clearer presentation of product condition and authentication details that built confidence for higher-value purchases

• Improved visibility for limited-edition and rare items that appealed to serious collectors

• Strategic promotion of shipping threshold incentives that encouraged multi-item purchases

These AOV improvements were particularly valuable because they leveraged existing traffic more effectively, improving unit economics without requiring proportional increases in acquisition spending.

When combined with the conversion rate improvements, the result was a dramatic increase in revenue per visitor – transforming Flight Club's digital profitability profile.

Successful Merger with GOAT and $60MM Raise

While the immediate performance improvements were significant, the strategic impact of our work extended far beyond incremental metrics.

Flight Club's enhanced digital capabilities and demonstrated growth trajectory positioned them as an attractive merger partner for GOAT, a digitally-native sneaker marketplace with complementary strengths.

The merger, announced in February 2020, created a true powerhouse in the sneaker resale market – combining Flight Club's brand heritage and retail presence with GOAT's technical sophistication and mobile-first approach.

The combined entity secured a $60 million funding round led by Foot Locker, validating their market position and providing capital for continued expansion.

Our transformation work contributed directly to this outcome in several ways:

1. Enhanced Valuation - The improved performance metrics demonstrated Flight Club's growth potential and justified a stronger valuation position during merger negotiations.

2. Technical Due Diligence - The modernized technology stack and clean data architecture simplified the due diligence process, reducing perceived integration risks.

3. Strategic Positioning - By resolving operational inefficiencies and establishing sustainable optimization processes, we repositioned Flight Club from a legacy retailer to a digitally-sophisticated growth company – making them a more attractive partner.

4. Complementary Capabilities - Our work highlighted Flight Club's unique strengths in authentication, curation, and brand storytelling – capabilities that complemented GOAT's technical and mobile expertise.

The successful merger and funding round represented the ultimate validation of our transformation approach – proving that comprehensive digital modernization could drive not just incremental performance improvements, but fundamental business value creation.

Conclusion

The Flight Club transformation stands as one of our most comprehensive and impactful client partnerships at GAMMA WAVES.

In just six months, we completely reimagined their digital presence while simultaneously resolving deep-seated operational challenges that had built up over years.

What makes this case particularly instructive is that it shows the interconnected nature of modern digital transformation.

We didn't simply implement a new website or migrate to a different technology platform.

Instead, we addressed the full ecosystem of technical infrastructure, operational processes, customer experience, and performance optimization methodology – creating a foundation for sustainable growth rather than a one-time solution.

The results – a 61% increase in conversion rate, 30% growth in average order value, and ultimately a successful merger and funding round – validate the power of this holistic approach.

By connecting technical solutions to genuine customer needs and business objectives, we delivered immediate performance improvements while positioning Flight Club for long-term success.

For other organizations facing similar inflection points, the Flight Club case offers several valuable lessons:

1. Digital transformation requires both technical expertise and deep customer understanding.

Our success came from combining robust technical solutions with genuine insights about the unique ways sneaker enthusiasts shop and engage with brands like Flight Club.

2. Optimization is a journey, not a destination.

Rather than delivering a static "finished" product, we established sustainable processes and capabilities that allowed Flight Club to continuously evolve their digital experience based on customer feedback and performance data.

3. Digital and physical experiences must be harmonized, not siloed.

Some of our most impactful interventions involved creating seamless connections between Flight Club's renowned physical stores and their digital presence – ensuring consistent inventory visibility, authentication standards, and brand experiences across channels.

4. Performance improvements and brand building are complementary, not contradictory.

We demonstrated that enhancing conversion rates and average order values could be achieved while simultaneously strengthening Flight Club's authentic connection to sneaker culture – proving that functionality and emotion can reinforce rather than compete with each other.

At Gamma Waves, we believe digital transformation is ultimately about enabling human potential – helping organizations express their unique value in the digital realm and connecting them more effectively with the customers they serve.

The Flight Club partnership exemplifies this philosophy, showing how technical excellence and human insight can combine to create exceptional outcomes for both businesses and their customers.

As Flight Club continues its journey as part of the GOAT Group, the foundation we established continues to support their growth and evolution.

For our team at Gamma Waves, this ongoing impact represents the true measure of successful transformation – not just immediate metrics, but sustained capability building that enables continued success long after our direct involvement has concluded.

BONUS: If you want to grow like Fight Club and increase your store’s CVR by at least 30%... click here.