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In 1996, high school sweethearts Matt and Darcie Lunsford turned a photocopied fanzine into a record label.
Thirty years later, Polyvinyl Record Co. is one of the most beloved independent labels in music — home to a catalog of 400+ releases, run from Champaign, Illinois by the same two people who started it, on the same 50/50 profit-sharing model they offered their very first artists.
Being independent means doing it all: when an artist has a new release coming, Polyvinyl handles the vinyl pressing, the CDs, the cassettes, the merch, and the marketing that makes sure fans can find it.
"We want to put music out and make it available in whatever format people want to consume it," said Chris Hassen, Director of Operations at Polyvinyl, who oversees both the label's DTC business and its production department.
And for a long time, Polyvinyl did all of that on a website they built themselves.
Challenge: a custom platform with one set of keys
Polyvinyl was never a typical ecommerce operation. The label had something most record labels don't: a developer on staff, and a fully custom-built online store shaped around the specific needs of selling records.
That independence came at a cost.
"If there were new features we wanted, we had to create them all from scratch," Chris said. “Only one person held the keys in that realm.”
When DTC went through the roof during COVID and kept growing year after year, the gap became impossible to ignore.
"It did feel like, oh, maybe we're leaving something on the table here with our custom website," Chris said. "Not being able to take advantage of all these features that are out there."
There was a merchandising problem underneath it, too.
Most orders on the old site were single-item purchases — one LP, one CD, one shirt. With a catalog spanning vinyl, CDs, cassettes, books, and merch, shoppers rarely discovered everything Polyvinyl carried.
"It takes so much effort to get someone to come to your site and buy something in the first place," Chris said. "If they're already here, hopefully they can pick up two or three things instead of just the one thing they were originally intending to."
Strategy: Rebuy in the foundation from day one
Polyvinyl didn't navigate the migration alone. The label partnered with Softlimit, the New York-based ecommerce agency behind its Shopify build — and it was Softlimit who brought Rebuy to the table.
"As soon as we started talking about the migration, we started talking about the opportunities available in the Shopify ecosystem," said Ben Lord, Founder of Softlimit. "Rebuy is a key piece of that for us. The thinking during the migration was: how do we take what's working one step further? How do we lift AOV that much more? How do we lay in a foundation from day one that gets the bump you weren't seeing before?"
For Chris, that guidance was the point of having an agency partner at all.
"They had it vetted for us," he said. "Rather than me going into the app store, typing in 'cross-sell,' and getting hundreds of results without really knowing what's good and what's not."
When the new Shopify store launched, Rebuy was live on day one — layered into a custom theme across every surface the team could touch: product pages, collection pages, recently viewed, checkout, and post-purchase.
And rather than settling for generic "you may also like" recommendations, the team tailored the strategy to how music fans actually shop.
"Within Polyvinyl's catalog, there are a lot of related artists — one band might have a member who's also in another band," Ben said. "How do we cross-reference those related artists, connect all of those dots, and tell the broader story across the site — not just let it be a static thing?"
The mystery vinyl: post purchase remixed
Polyvinyl's first post-purchase offer became its signature move: the mystery vinyl.
The pitch is simple. Complete your checkout, and you're offered one record pulled from anywhere in Polyvinyl's 400+ release catalog — at a steep discount. You don't know what you'll get.
That's the fun.
"The success rate of people going for that was super high right out of the gate," Chris said.
The numbers back it up. Since January, the mystery offer has been shown to thousands of shoppers at checkout — and 15% of them said yes. The team has experimented since — mystery CDs, digital albums, merch items — but nothing beats a surprise record at a discount.
"We've been joking that people actually prefer not to know what they're getting," Chris said. "You label something 'mystery' or 'surprise,' and people are like, 'Oh, I've got to know what it is.'"
It's a strategy that works because it doesn't feel like a clearance bin, Ben noted: "It sets you up in a way that you can really surprise some customers, and they can get some cool things."
For a label whose fans have a collector's mentality, a discounted mystery record is close to irresistible — and it reframed what checkout even means.
"Just because somebody completed the checkout didn't mean the sale was over," Chris said. "The success rate of the conversions on that was so high that it really blew us away. That was the moment that solidified for us that there are tools out there we weren't taking advantage of before — and now we actually have the ability to."
Raising the floor between the spikes
Polyvinyl's revenue calendar runs on tent poles: album releases and beloved annual sales, like the $5 CD and tape sale, or the summer "garage sale" — a roughly 15-year tradition where 1,000+ items, including records with dinged jackets and perfect vinyl inside, go up at a discount.
Those moments spike traffic. The harder question is everything in between.
"We don't want it to be entirely feast or famine," Chris said. "It's just a Wednesday — how do we get people to the site? How do we still maintain orders and revenue on all the days in between?"
That's where always-on merchandising earns its keep: with recommendations working every surface of the site, every visit is a chance at a bigger order, whether it's release day or a random Tuesday.
Ben sees Polyvinyl's whole approach as a model for the industry.
"The music industry has always been very third-party-distributor led," he said. "This is a great opportunity for labels to own a piece of real estate and communicate with their customers in a way that's generally been neglected. Polyvinyl treats their store like a real surface they can control — first-party data, direct communication. They think about DTC in a way that goes deep."
Playing the site like an instrument
On the old platform, checking performance meant downloading spreadsheets and running the numbers by hand.
Now, the data is just there.
"Just being able to visualize analytics in a way they hadn't before — that stood out," Ben said. "It's not a set-it-and-forget-it thing. It's something you can go back to regularly and say, all right, can we tune this a little bit?"
The Polyvinyl team took that to heart. Chris and co-founder Matt Lunsford recently blocked off a full day just to audit the site together — and most of the agenda was Rebuy.
"How is this performing? Do we have Rebuy widgets everywhere they should be? Are they showing the right products?" Chris said. "We have this very powerful thing at our disposal — let's make sure we're actually using it to the best of our ability and not just letting it sit there."
Results: bigger baskets, powered by discovery
The numbers tell the story. Polyvinyl has seen:
- 8.25% higher AOV (over the last 30 days)
- Nearly 1 in 5 orders assisted by Rebuy (over the last 30 days)
- 15% conversion on the mystery vinyl offer (over the last six months)
"We get equally nerdy about music as we do about ecommerce," Chris said. "It's a good intersection of our interests over here."
Since migrating to Shopify with Softlimit and building Rebuy into the foundation from day one, Polyvinyl has lifted AOV by 8.25% and turned checkout into a second chance to sell — one mystery record at a time.
