At Guardair, product content helps customers choose equipment that keeps workers safe. After rebuilding their Shopify storefront around those buying decisions, the manufacturer recorded nearly 50% higher total sales year over year in the first three months after the relaunch.
Founded in 1942, Guardair makes safety air guns, pneumatic vacuums, and compressed-air cleaning tools for industrial facilities. Plant managers, maintenance teams, and safety professionals need to understand how a tool will perform before they order. Guardair’s website gives them the details they need to choose the right tool, whether they buy directly or through a distributor.
Direct orders give Guardair daily contact with the people using their tools and a better understanding of their needs. After about eight years on Shopify, the team made the online customer experience a greater priority and invested in the remodel to reach more customers and make their technical expertise available wherever buyers begin their research.
With their Shopify relaunch, Guardair has seen:
- Nearly 50% higher total sales year over year
- About a 1-percentage-point increase in returning-customer rate year over year
- Over 60% more US collection-page traffic compared with the preceding three months
The challenge
Supporting customers across buying channels
Guardair built their business through distributors before adding direct online sales about a decade ago. Their first ecommerce site ran on Joomla, an open-source platform. Joomla gave Guardair a way to begin selling online, but the customization and self-maintenance common to open-source systems often required technical support.
About eight years ago, Guardair moved to Shopify so nontechnical team members could manage more of the storefront themselves, spend less time on infrastructure, security, and maintenance, and focus on helping customers research and buy the right products. Shopify also let Guardair expand direct sales while preserving their distributor relationships.
Ecommerce initially played a supporting role in the distributor-led business. Guardair wanted to make their website a stronger resource for customers, whether they purchase online, contact the sales team, or work with a distributor.
Product specifications help customers choose the industrial air gun best suited to their application. Guardair already held that information in Shopify, but the previous main landing pages primarily displayed product family names, giving buyers limited detail to narrow their choices before opening individual product pages.
Specification tables on product pages largely pulled from metafields, but variants were not grouped together as they are now. The site lacked a consistent way to compare products within a series. Collection pages were appearing in Google searches but were not part of the main navigation. The storefront needed to make the technical catalog more accessible to buyers arriving through either route.
You’re keeping people safe that work in your facility. So, it’s really important to work with a company that’s a knowledgeable partner and buy the right tool.
Making the online customer experience a priority
As the online customer experience became a top company priority, Guardair brought in Christy Davey to help lead the work. Christy manages the Shopify sites and campaign planning. Over time, the company had accumulated different themes, partner implementations, and app-based features across three stores, making coordinated improvements more involved.
Guardair wanted to get more from Shopify and invest in the customer experience. Christy’s plan paired a more consistent back end with stronger search, clearer typography, and richer product information, giving the team a foundation they could keep improving.
The solution
Building on Shopify with an industrial specialist
Guardair chose YellowWebMonkey after a recommendation and conversations with several agencies. The partner understood industrial tools and shared the team’s preference for using more of Shopify’s existing capabilities, with an option for custom development where the catalog required it.
Christy set the project scope. YellowWebMonkey led the architecture and back-end work, while both teams shaped the design. The Guardair remodel launched in April 2026.
We wanted to make the most of Shopify’s capabilities. It’s designed to make things easier, and we felt we didn’t need to make unnecessary customizations when Shopify already had much of the functionality we needed.
Making specifications reusable across the storefront
Much of Guardair’s technical data lived in variant-level metafields, custom fields attached to a particular product variant. YellowWebMonkey wrote custom theme code to display those fields consistently across the storefront, preserving Guardair’s existing product-data structure.
A shared metaobject structure now controls which specifications appear on collection cards, product pages, and series comparison charts. Guardair uses the same organized information throughout the journey with variants grouped together in the specification tables.
The catalog also controls availability and product badges. Moving a product to draft removes it from display, and stock status and badges reflect the underlying product data. Guardair also uses metaobjects to group related products while preserving each product’s distinct title, URL, and specifications.
Helping buyers narrow the catalog before they order
The new navigation connects buyers directly to collections and detailed category pages. Within a collection, buyers can filter by specifications and review technical details on product cards. A separate Snap Compare app provides interactive side-by-side comparison. Product pages combine custom specification tables with imagery that helps buyers evaluate the equipment.
Our product detail pages work a lot harder than they ever have, and that’s been a big improvement to me as part of this project.
When Christy first showed inside sales the rebuilt site, search was the feature they were most excited about. The same tools customers use to research equipment give sales staff a more useful resource during phone and live-chat conversations.
Better self-service gives Guardair customers several ways to buy:
- Customers who need advice can still speak with the team and receive a Shopify draft order.
- Buyers who have already identified the right equipment can order directly.
- Others use the site to research the product and then purchase through their preferred distributor.
Guardair’s product information supports each path.
The results
Measuring the impact of the Shopify relaunch
From April to July 2026:
- Guardair’s total sales grew nearly 50% year over year.
- The returning-customer rate rose about 1 percentage point year over year.
- Guardair experienced their strongest month ever for gross sales on Shopify.
More detailed product pages made Guardair’s higher-end product lines, such as pneumatic vacuums, easier to evaluate online as well, giving buyers clearer information about higher-value equipment suited to their applications.
The redesigned storefront makes it easier for customers to research products and purchase online, while still offering personalized support for those who need additional guidance.
Growing traffic to product collections
From April to July 2026, US collection-page traffic grew more than 60% compared with the preceding three months. The collection pages give buyers access to technical specifications and comparison tools as they narrow their product choices.
Google Search visibility also improved following the relaunch, with increased impressions across key product collections.
Guardair is also seeing referral traffic from ChatGPT. Structured specifications give search engines and AI assistants more explicit product information to interpret, including the technical attributes a buyer might include in a question. The team is watching how AI-assisted discovery develops alongside traditional search.
Continuing to improve the industrial buying experience
The broader program applied similar improvements across Guardair, AirSpade, and Allpax, which together sell hundreds of products through three Shopify sites. Each site launched separately. The results above are specific to Guardair.
Shopify’s accessible back end gives Heather and Christy more capacity to improve product content and the buying experience.
What can we build that’s going to be excellent for the customer, that’s going to help them find what they need?