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Founded on the belief that writing by hand deserves beautiful tools, paper republic has spent years building a product system that rewards loyalty. Its leather journals aren't impulse purchases — they're considered investments, chosen by customers who care about quality and want something that will last. That means the ecommerce experience has to earn their trust before a purchase is ever made.
Getting the product page right matters. Getting the collection page right matters. And for a team without a large engineering bench, every improvement to the site needed to be worth the effort it took.
Before adopting Shogun A/B Testing, the paper republic team had no shortage of hypotheses. They had intuitions about which elements on the page were working and which weren't. What they lacked was an easy way to find out.
"Before Shogun, implementing tests required development resources and often felt too complex or time-consuming to justify," says Anastasia Volokhatyuk, E-commerce Specialist at paper republic. "This meant that many decisions were based on assumptions rather than validated data."
The friction wasn't a lack of curiosity — it was a lack of infrastructure. Every test required pulling in development time, scoping the change, building the variant, and then trying to measure the result in a way that was actually reliable. For a lean team with a full roadmap, that cost made experimentation feel like a luxury rather than a default.
"The biggest challenge was speed," Anastasia explains. "We had ideas for improvements but lacked an easy way to validate them. Even relatively small changes could take significant effort to implement and measure properly, which limited the number of experiments we could run."
The result was a site shaped more by assumption than evidence — and a growing backlog of ideas that never got tested.
When evaluating experimentation platforms, paper republic's priorities were practical: easy implementation, reliable reporting, statistical confidence, and deep Shopify integration. There was also one factor that stood out in a crowded field of tools — the pricing model.
"We were looking for a way to run structured experiments directly within Shopify without building a custom testing framework," Anastasia explains.
Shogun checked every box. Unlike platforms that gate usage behind session volume — which can make costs unpredictable for growing stores — Shogun's experiment-based model gave the team a clearer picture of what they were paying for. And the tool itself was built to be used by the people closest to the product, not just engineers.
"Shogun offered a good balance between flexibility and ease of use," she adds. "It allowed us to launch meaningful experiments quickly while remaining accessible to non-technical team members."
Onboarding was straightforward, and once the initial setup was done, the workflow became a natural part of how the team approached site changes.
With the infrastructure in place, paper republic turned its backlog of ideas into a real testing program. Collection page experiments and theme-level changes have delivered the most value — two areas where small design decisions can meaningfully affect whether a customer explores further or bounces.
One early test focused on color selectors in product thumbnails. The question was simple: would replacing thumbnail images in color swatches with actual color chips improve the experience? It was a change the team had suspected would help based on prior usability research, but they hadn't had a clean way to confirm it. The test validated what they'd observed — and gave the team a model for how to treat future usability hypotheses.
The more striking result came from a bundle test on the collection page. paper republic added a visible component list directly to bundle listings, giving customers an at-a-glance breakdown of what was included before clicking through.
The outcome was decisive. The test reached 100% statistical significance in just two days, with a clear improvement in conversion. For a team that had previously struggled to get any experiment off the ground in that timeframe, the speed of the signal was as meaningful as the result itself.
"One of the biggest learnings was that seemingly small UX changes can have a measurable impact on customer behavior," Anastasia says.
Beyond any single result, what Shogun changed most was the team's default posture toward site decisions. Where assumptions once drove changes, data now shapes them.
"Instead of debating assumptions, we can validate ideas with data," Anastasia explains. "This has increased confidence in decision-making and helped us prioritize changes that actually improve customer experience and business performance."
That shift compounding over time is the real value. Each test produces a learning. Each learning makes the next hypothesis sharper. And the speed of feedback — days rather than development cycles — means the team can move through ideas faster without sacrificing rigor.
"Experimentation has become an important part of how we approach ecommerce decisions," she says. "Rather than relying solely on intuition, we increasingly use testing to validate changes before rolling them out across the entire store."
paper republic is now looking further up the page — specifically at product imagery, premium visual presentation, and broader product page experiences. After seeing how much impact small UX changes can have at the collection level, the team sees significant room to test what drives purchase confidence at the point of decision.
For other ecommerce brands considering the same path, Anastasia's advice is direct:
"Start testing sooner than you think. Many assumptions that feel obvious turn out to be wrong, and even small changes can generate meaningful improvements when validated with real customer behavior."
And for teams that feel like they need a dedicated optimization function before they can start: "Don't wait until you have a large optimization team," she says. "Some of the most valuable insights come from testing simple ideas. The sooner you build a culture of experimentation, the faster you learn what actually works for your customers."
paper republic's story is a clear example of what happens when a lean team removes the friction from experimentation. Before Shogun, good ideas stalled waiting for development bandwidth. After, those same ideas became tests — and tests became signals that shaped real decisions.
A bundle component list on the collection page. A swap from thumbnail images to color swatches. Changes that might have sat on a backlog indefinitely are now live learnings that make the next iteration smarter.
"Start testing sooner than you think" isn't just advice for other brands. It's a summary of what paper republic found on the other side of building that habit.
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