Chris Sherman joined the Duxbury, Massachusetts–based Island Creek Oysters team at 13, working at its neighboring general store. By 2009, when he was promoted to CEO, the company primarily sold directly to a handful of Boston-area restaurants and local distributors. But Chris saw more potential to scale the brand through ecommerce, innovative logistics, and careful brand building. Since then, he’s helped transform Island Creek Oysters from a small oyster farm into a premium seafood powerhouse that ships to 46 states.
Ahead, Chris shares how Island Creek Oysters took the ecommerce plunge, and continues to increase revenue.
Finding product-market fit
The company’s first venture into ecommerce in 2010 was modest. “We did like $6,500 in revenue the first year online,” Chris shares. “That was probably $6,000 more than I thought we were gonna do. Our big question was, I just didn’t think anyone was gonna want to shuck oysters at home.” But soon, customers returned online to buy more, sharing photos and videos of themselves shucking oysters at parties and events.
After blowing his revenue projections out of the water, Chris knew the demand for direct-to-consumer premium seafood was there, so he decided to lean into ecommerce. Today, Island Creek Oysters does millions in sales each year.
Scaling ecommerce strategically
A series of smart decisions over time has made it possible for Island Creek to scale its online presence.
1. Building customer trust
It was important, Chris says, for customers to be able to trust that their seafood would arrive at a temperature that was safe for consumption. “[Customers] are picky about [arrival] dates,” Chris says. “The core challenge is maintaining that temperature in the packaging.” In order to solve this problem, he installed temperature monitoring devices into each package. Now, customers can check to make sure that the proper temperature has been maintained throughout travel.
2. Solving shipping economics
One of Island Creek Oysters’ earliest breakthrough moments came from analyzing its Shopify data. “We had a high cart abandonment rate,” Chris explains. The solution? Embedding shipping costs directly into product prices, and making the product shipping cost free to customers—a move that eliminated all but a small percentage of those cart abandonments—and caused revenue to triple.
3. Mixing up marketing strategies
Rather than relying solely on digital advertising, Island Creek Oysters takes a holistic approach to its marketing strategy—one built on experimentation. “We’ve tried everything over the years,” Chris says. “We tried [discount] codes that we pass out at events, we spent a lot on in-house creative [for digital marketing], display ads.”
In addition to digital marketing, Chris took the oysters on the road to spread the word through live events and demos. “We were on the road for years and years doing events and things like that. So I like to think we helped kind of drive the oyster Renaissance, as we call it,” Chris says. Having multiple touch points for different types of customers will lead to steady growth.
Selecting partnerships that drive growth
Island Creek Oysters’ relationship with renowned restaurants has been a critical piece of reinforcing the brand’s premium reputation. Its oysters, for example, are featured in a signature dish at Thomas Keller’s Per Se and The French Laundry. The oysters, Chris notes, are “one of the few things that have stayed on the menu every day since Per Se opened.”
Affiliation with restaurants known for sourcing only the highest-quality ingredients allows Island Creek to maintain premium pricing with its direct customers, and in turn afford the best equipment possible and provide competitive wages for employees—all of which ensures that product standards are kept high.
Maintaining quality as you expand
The company has strategically expanded into new categories like caviar and tinned fish while staying true to its core values of sustainability. Key to success in these new ventures has been in building and independently owning its own supply chain wherever possible. In addition to the online store, for example, Island Creek Oysters has built its own cannery nearby in New Bedford for tinned fish, and set up in-house caviar packing. This vertical integration allows it to maintain quality control and trace its products at every step.
This dedication to quality in the midst of growth is just one of the reasons people have loved Island Creek for so long. And the numbers speak for themselves: 60% of online business comes from repeat customers, and average order value is approximately $150.
Island Creek Oysters continues to innovate in aquaculture, expand the sustainable seafood market, and explore new product offerings. “The rising tide floats all boats,” Chris notes, as the brand now distributes for hundreds of other farms while maintaining its premium position in the market.
Catch the full interview on the Shopify Masters podcast and learn how Chris continues to improve the online shopping experience for premium seafood while growing Island Creek Oysters’s brand recognition.
