Shopify migration, GTM, and social for a DTC ski startup.

The brief

Snap Two Ski is an independent ski brand with a real product story and the usual challenges of any small DTC: a website that isn't built to sell, a wholesale program that needs structure, and limited bandwidth to stand up the marketing infrastructure that lets a small brand grow.

What I'm doing

The engagement runs across two phases. Phase one focuses on foundations: migrating the e-commerce store from GoDaddy to Shopify, refining the wholesale program to industry standards, recruiting independent sales reps, building a go-to-market strategy from sell-in to sell-out, standing up a custom browser game and prize contest as an owned acquisition channel, and taking over social media management once the store was live. Phase two layers on growth: SEO content, paid digital strategy, an affiliate program, a B2B ordering platform, and the Amazon launch.

A game, and a reason to come back

One of the most distinctive pieces of the engagement: we built Snap Two a custom browser game. You ski a tethered parent-and-kid pair down the hill — dodging trees and rocks, grabbing cocoa for extra lives — which makes the product itself the thing you're playing. It's genuinely fun, and it lives right on the storefront.

The game does real marketing work. Every run ends at a leaderboard, where players post a score and — to enter a prize contest — an email. For a brand this size, that's an owned acquisition channel: engagement and email capture that doesn't depend on paid media. We developed the contest strategy together with the team — prizes, dates, and mechanics — and drafted official rules to keep it clean and compliant. The Summer Showdown also earned Snap Two its first press hit of the engagement, a spot in Freeskier's Father's Day gift guide.

Running social, not just advising on it

Once the store was live, social moved from consulting to management. Snap Two had the footage and a product story parents want to share, but the account was posting about once a week and the numbers showed it. So I took over the channels in late September. I built a queue of thirty-three finished reels with captions, filed by post date, and set a rhythm of two to three posts a week. I added a weekly talking-head tip from Andrew Reinhart, who runs Snap Two and is a PSIA Level 3 instructor, because the data was clear that a face in the first frame holds attention and scenery does not. And I lined up collab posts with the brand's dealers and partners, which put the tether in front of their followers at no cost.

Five weeks in, every number moved the right way. Instagram went from 266 to 353 followers, with organic follows running four times the pre-season pace and an $82 boost doing the rest. Profile visits went up seven times. Site visits from social went from 6 to 303, and social became the store's biggest source of sessions at 54% of traffic. The audience that showed up is the one Snap Two wants: parents 35 to 44, split evenly between moms and dads, in the Twin Cities ski towns where the brand's dealers are.

The part that makes this repeatable is the monthly audit. Each one reads the posts against the numbers and turns that into a short list of habits. Posts that gave people someone to send them to ran 5 to 9% engagement. Reels posted four at a time split their reach four ways, so the rule became one post a day. Stories without a link sticker sent zero visits, so every story gets one now. That is the same program I now offer to other small businesses: a queue built from what you already have, a rhythm the platform rewards, and a plain-numbers audit every month.

Why this works

A brand at Snap Two's stage doesn't need a full agency. It needs senior thinking on the right things in the right order — and someone who can bring the practical judgment to choose what's worth doing this season versus next. That's what this engagement is built around.

This case study will be expanded as the work progresses.

See the work live at snaptwoski.com →