Thesis Achieves 212% DTC Conversion Rate Lift

“We wanted the agility to scale up our resources as needed — a team of experts to give us recommendations and advice on UX and tech, not something restrictive or purely project execution.”

Maranda Lujajohnson

Director of Special Projects, Thesis

Impact

69% Conversion Rate Lift, Then 212%

Thesis's conversion rate climbed from 2.2% to 3.72% in the first twelve months of the partnership. After four years, Thesis achieved a 212% CVR lift.

Zero-Disruption Replatform

Anatta migrated Thesis from a fragile headless architecture to Shopify with no gap in brand experience, preserving their signature Product Quiz throughout.

$8.4M Series A Raised

Within a year of the replatform, Thesis closed an $8.4M Series A backed by Unilever Ventures, Alive VC, and NBA star Kevin Love.

The Challenge

Thesis's Headless Architecture Becomes the Bottleneck

Since 2017, Thesis had built its brand on personalization — notably, a custom Product Quiz that matched customers to nootropic formulas designed for their goals. To scale that experience, Thesis invested in a headless storefront. But without the engineering depth to sustain it, the architecture meant to accelerate the brand began working against it.

As growth slowed, the cracks began showing:

The roadmap froze. Strategic priorities — scaling the Product Quiz, aligning the site with a recent rebrand — stalled behind a growing queue of maintenance work.
Leadership was pulled into firefighting. Every fix from the outsourced team turned into more bugs, and the founder was spending nights putting out fires on the website instead of running the company.
Conversion flatlined after the rebrand. A new visual identity had shipped without conversion discipline behind it, leaving Thesis’s CVR stuck at 2.2% while paid acquisition costs climbed.
The vendor model was broken. Outsourced maintenance delivered patches without ownership; there was no consistency, no quality standard, and no strategic guidance on UX or technology decisions.

Thesis needed more than a rescue. It needed a partner who could stabilize the foundation, restart the roadmap, and own conversion through the rebrand.

Every fix from our outsourced team turned into more bugs. I was spending my nights putting out fires on the website instead of running the company.

Dan Freed

Founder & CEO, Thesis

The Solution

Anatta Rebuilds the Foundation — Without Breaking the Experience

Thesis and Anatta kicked off the partnership with a clear first priority: replatform from the fragile headless architecture to Shopify. Anatta assembled a dedicated, end-to-end team with the flexibility to scale resources as the roadmap demanded.

A Migration Engineered for Zero Disruption

Anatta opened with a discovery sprint, auditing Thesis's platform requirements and mapping every critical store function before a single line of code moved. The mandate: customers should never encounter a gap in brand experience.

While the frontend team carried over the site's visual identity, Anatta's engineers rebuilt the backend for scale. The new architecture would absorb growth and support rapid experimentation. The centerpiece was Thesis's Product Quiz, the brand's signature discovery experience, which was preserved fully intact through the transition.

The Thesis homepage after the migration — The Thesis homepage

Personalization, Productized

With the migration complete, Anatta built onto the new foundation, developing a fully custom Build Your Own Box feature. The box builder let new and returning customers assemble personalized product combinations, deepening the personalization promise at the core of the Thesis brand. Anatta also began optimizing the product finder quiz and the customer subscription portal, turning one-time buyers into managed relationships.

The Build Your Own Box feature Anatta developed for Thesis — Build Your Own Box

A Redesign Validated Page by Page

Next, Anatta and Thesis began the site-wide redesign. The goal was to align the storefront with Thesis’s new brand identity and infuse conversion-focused journeys. Rather than a risky big-bang relaunch, Anatta executed the redesign as a sequence of page-level reskins. Each reskin was deployed with A/B tests to confirm projected KPI gains before full rollout, so conversion was protected at every step.

Our branding agency are great designers, but design and CRO are different disciplines; we leaned on Anatta to own the conversion side of the redesign.

Maranda Lujajohnson

Director of Special Projects, Thesis

The program demanded tight coordination between three parties: Anatta, Thesis, and Thesis’s branding agency. Within a quarter, more than 90% of the redesign was complete.

Newly designed pages on the Thesis website

The Results

Thesis Converts Its Rebuild Into Growth

Twelve months after the partnership began, the numbers told the story:

69% Conversion Rate Lift: Thesis’s sitewide conversion rate rose from 2.2% to 3.72% in just under one year — through a full replatform and a complete redesign, two projects that routinely drag conversion down.
A Replatform With No Revenue Gap: The migration from headless to Shopify shipped with zero disruption to brand experience; Thesis’s Product Quiz, checkout, and subscription flows never went dark.
A Redesign That Paid Its Way: More than 90% of the redesign was completed within one quarter, with every reskinned page validated by A/B testing before rollout.
18+ CRO Tests Launched: The testing program continued beyond the redesign, converting Thesis’s storefront into a continuously optimized asset rather than a one-time build.
A Proven Peak Season: Thesis ran its first Black Friday/Cyber Monday on the new Shopify foundation without incident — the stability test every replatform ultimately faces.
An $8.4M Series A: In May 2023, Thesis closed its Series A with investors including Unilever Ventures, Redo Ventures, Alive VC, Break Trail, NBA All-Star Kevin Love, and model Kate Bock, capping a year in which the brand’s digital foundation was rebuilt end to end.

Looking Forward

Following the initial partnership, Anatta and Thesis reimagined the customer portal for increased personalization and launched a slate of new CRO experiments focused on subscription retention. Anatta also architected a MarTech stack to support ongoing channel growth through customer analytics. Over three additional years, the two teams expanded optimization into three distinct customer journeys — Quiz-centric, Build-A-Box, and Affiliate Landing — resulting in a 212% lift in conversion rate.

Thesis Achieves 212% DTC Conversion Rate Lift

Impact

Thesis's Headless Architecture Becomes the Bottleneck

Anatta Rebuilds the Foundation — Without Breaking the Experience

Thesis Converts Its Rebuild Into Growth

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