TW Carbon isn’t your average bike shop. Based in St. Louis, they are master craftsmen specializing in carbon fiber repair and custom painting. They take high-end bicycles that have been crashed or damaged and restore them to, or often better than, factory condition.
Their work has been featured in Forbes for creating custom “dream bikes” and serving as the custom paint supplier to National Champion bike racer Lucas Bourgoyne. Their craftsmanship was world-class, but their digital presence was stuck in the slow lane. They were operating on reputation, and their infrastructure wasn’t built to scale.
The problem
Nick Hand, the founder of TW Carbon, faced a dilemma common to many specialized small business owners: he was too busy doing the work to sell the work.
The business was bootstrapped, running on a DIY Wix website that didn’t reflect the premium quality of his repairs. The site lacked basic UX best practices or a content and SEOSEOSearch Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing web content to improve its visibility and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). strategy, so potential customers weren’t finding him organically.
The biggest bottleneck was the process. Nick had no system to field or manage customer inquiries. Every lead was just another email in a crowded inbox. Without a CRM or tracking system, conversations were hard to organize, and the sales cycle, already lengthy for high-end custom work, was prone to slipping through the cracks.
Nick needed to be in the workshop painting and repairing bicycle frames, not wrestling with a clunky website or digging through Gmail to find a quote from three weeks ago.
The solution
We recognized immediately that trust was the currency TW Carbon was trading in. When a cyclist crashes a $10,000 bike, their biggest fear is safety. They need to know the repair will hold up at 40 mph down a twisty mountain. The bike also has to look like a $10,000 bike again.
I reframed the brand narrative to address these fears head-on. I focused the messaging on “Safety” and “Craftsmanship,” so every page of the new site reinforced the quality and structural integrity of TW Carbon’s work, backed by strong photography of the results.
To support this strategy, we ran a complete technical overhaul:
- High-performance web development: we replaced the slow Wix site with a fast, scalable one, and built a dedicated blog to show their carbon repair and custom paint work so any visitor can see the expertise firsthand.
- HubSpot integration: we implemented HubSpot and custom email automations, replacing the chaotic inbox with a structured pipeline. When a prospect reaches out, they enter a system that tracks their status, so Nick and his team can manage the sales process without confusion.
- Content and analytics: we rolled out a full content strategyContent StrategyContent strategy is the plan that decides what content gets created, for whom, targeting which queries, in what order, connecting publishing effort to search visibility and revenue. to build organic reach, paired with analytics. For the first time, Nick stopped guessing where his customers were coming from and started seeing the data.
The result
The numbers moved quickly. Professionalizing the digital experience turned a local repair shop into a steady source of qualified leads.
- Traffic: the site now runs 300% higher than day one.
- Organic reach: a 200% increase in organic clicks and impressions over the last 12 months.
- Conversion: from no tracking at all to a steady 10% conversion rate, up from an initial 6%.
- Core Web VitalsCore Web VitalsCore Web Vitals are a set of specific factors that Google considers important in a webpage: the new site scores 90+, which helps both Google rankings and the real user experience.
Most importantly, Nick has reclaimed his time. The new system manages the leads, so he can focus on being a craftsman while the business scales in the background.
What it proves
TW Carbon shows that you don’t need a massive team to have a massive impact, you just need the right foundation. By aligning their digital strategy with the quality of their physical work, they reached growth that was previously out of reach.
We continue to refine their site and strategy so they keep their edge.
If you are tired of your website being a digital brochure that doesn’t generate revenue, it’s time to fix the foundation.