Gozney - A Strategic Approach to Growth and Optimization

Gozney is revolutionizing outdoor cooking by bringing the high performance and quality of commercial ovens into the home. As pioneers in live-fire outdoor ovens, they’ve cultivated a passionate and influential community that shares a love for pizza-making. With a commitment to craftsmanship and innovation, Gozney continues to inspire outdoor culinary experiences worldwide.

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Man cooking pizza in a Gozney pizza oven

Challenge

Gozney was experiencing rapid growth in its direct-to-consumer channels, driven by the rising demand for its premium pizza ovens and increased consumer interest in outdoor cooking. They needed an optimized website that was capable of scaling with their success. At this pivotal stage, Gozney sought a digital agency that could act as an extension of its team—offering strategic guidance, a collaborative approach, and the flexibility to support frequent code deployments and feature updates.

Approach

ZaneRay kicked off the partnership with Gozney by conducting a comprehensive website audit for Gozney, aiming to optimize their e-commerce site and enhance the brand experience through a UX audit, a usability study, and a shopping analysis. The UX audit revealed opportunities to create a more premium and results-driven presentation of content, products, and brand values. A sitewide usability study was conducted to identify pain points, establish any improvements to usability, and observe user interactions while gathering feedback on features, content, and overall impressions. The shopping analysis involved a blend of e-commerce expert analysis, proven industry best practices, and a cognitive walkthrough of the website with real product ordering and testing.

Incremental Tech Innovation

Gozney had an established storefront across six international sites but needed a way to optimize its site without a full rebuild from scratch. To enable immediate enhancements and feature additions, our development team implemented a custom multi-theme solution, allowing us to integrate ZaneRay’s Borealis Shopify storefront for new feature development without disrupting the existing site. Over two years, we seamlessly transitioned the entire Gozney site to the new custom build while also supporting multiple product launches across all six global stores.

Zaneray and Gozney team workshop — Strategic planning workshop week with Gozney at ZaneRay headquarters in Whitefish, MT

Up close shot of people's hands grabbing pizza off of a cutting board

A Partnership Defined by Strategy

Once our teams had come close to addressing the initial challenges and opportunities that surfaced from our testing, it was time to re-establish priorities and goals for the Gozney website. ZaneRay hosted a custom 3.5-day workshop at our headquarters with Gozney to align on business goals, review past successes, and plan the future digital roadmap. Our UX Design Director facilitated UX strategy frameworks related to information architecture, content planning, and consumer journey mapping, while our Shopify Director then created a full set of technical requirements for Gozney’s seamless migration to Shopify 2.0. The workshop culminated in a clear roadmap, outlining technical requirements and next steps. Our propriety workshop framework resulted in a comprehensive 12-24 month project plan, ensuring a strategic approach to Gozney’s e-commerce evolution.

The in-person kickoff meeting in Whitefish was the best experience. We spent long hours in the office going over the future state of the brand and business–and finished it up with a team bike ride.

Chris Springer, Head Of Ecommerce at Gozney

Streamlined Navigation for a Seamless Purchase Experience

Our early usability research uncovered a key challenge: users initially couldn’t tell if Gozney sold only ovens or included accessories, or what accessories they needed for the full experience. These insights drove our navigation UX strategy, where we created a guided shopping journey that answers these questions upfront. With an intuitive flow, the new site leads customers through selecting their pizza oven and the essential accessories, making it easier for customers to confidently select what they need to fully enjoy their pizza-making experience.

Fueling Enhanced Pizza Oven Shopping

Gozney offers a diverse range of pizza ovens, each with distinct fuel options, specs, features, and benefits. Drawing from the insights gained during usability testing, we created oven cards that offer users a quick snapshot of key specs without leaving the product list. Shoppers can easily compare ovens and find the model that best fits their pizza-making and lifestyle needs—creating a smoother, more enjoyable shopping journey from start to finish.

Product Discovery Through Immersive Collections

To elevate Gozney’s collection pages, autoplay video was integrated directly into the shopping journey, showcasing products in real-world use. This dynamic approach was complemented by lifestyle imagery incorporated into product cards to help novice pizza chefs quickly understand how accessories fit into the pizza-making process. Custom filters were implemented to allow customers to easily shop for accessories specific to their Gozney oven, making the buying journey more intuitive. Additionally, the revamped collections pages were designed with future growth in mind, ensuring they can support merchandising for future limited-edition product launches and brand collaborations.

Flexible Product Pages for Informed Purchasing

Continuing to focus on a seamless shopping experience, we integrated Rebuy into the product pages, allowing for seamless accessory add-ons before purchasing a pizza oven. We also built a flexible, composable layout with many features that enable the Gozney team to highlight important pizza oven features and address key consumer questions, such as available fuel types and oven size compatibility, ensuring customers make informed purchase decisions.

SEO Optimized Recipes with Smart Merchandising

We reimagined Gozney’s recipe experience by optimizing it for SEO with Google structured data, ensuring strong search visibility. The redesigned recipes landing page now features dynamic, multi-faceted filters that let users explore content based on cooking styles, meal categories, dietary needs, and more. Additionally, the new recipe detail pages offer a media-rich and interactive experience, seamlessly integrating merchandising opportunities for ovens and accessories within the recipe content.

A Chef-Led Ambassador Experience

The new brand ambassador experience provides users with a curated space to explore recipes from their favorite chefs. This feature reinforces Gozney's culinary collaborations and deepens user engagement through an exclusive, chef-led content journey tailored to food enthusiasts.

A Recipe For Success

Gozney is a remarkable brand creating category-leading outdoor cooking products, tapping into a growing market with high demand. Not only are they excelling on the product side, but their digital team is also exceptionally talented, ambitious, and strategic. They know exactly where to invest to drive growth, attracting new customers while delivering fresh experiences to engage existing ones.

We began our collaboration by gathering key insights to inform our approach, leading to a data-driven strategy and growth roadmap. Over time, ZaneRay seamlessly integrated our Borealis Design System into their Shopify site without disrupting ongoing initiatives. Gozney exemplifies the type of client who understands how and where to invest for a successful e-commerce practice. We love working with their team and are excited to continue growing both the brand and its community of pizza enthusiasts. Our partnership continues to evolve with plans for new products and feature launches on the horizon.

We are looking forward to the future of our partnership with the ZaneRay team and the new opportunities ahead for additional research projects and feature rollouts. Diving into customer research isn’t always on the menu with a development agency, but is something that we have found invaluable.