SERVICES__
What we do in-house for outdoor brands. Pick one or all of them.
CREATE__
CONTENT PRODUCTION
Photo and video, from a quick social shoot to a full production.
BRANDING AND DESIGN
The look and language that make a brand recognizable.
COPYWRITING
Brand stories and product copy that sells.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Organic and paid, planned and posted in-house.
WEBSITES AND LANDING PAGES
Pages that look good and convert.
CONVERT__
PERFORMANCE MARKETING
Google and Meta ads built to bring back more than they cost.
CONVERSION RATE OPTIMIZATION
Finding and fixing the leaks between a click and a checkout.
SEO AND AI SEARCH
Making your products easier to find without paying for every visit.
E-COMMERCE AND SHOPIFY
Stores that sell more without more ad spend.
EMAIL AND KLAVIYO
Flows and campaigns that keep customers coming back.
ANALYTICS AND REPORTING
GA4, tracking, and monthly reports written in plain English.
OPERATE__
AI AUTOMATION
Backend systems for support, reporting, and inventory that save a small team hours and never touch your customers.
PRODUCT LAUNCHES
Content, email, and ads timed to the day the product drops.
INFLUENCER AND AMBASSADOR PROGRAMS
Riders and athletes who use the gear.
PR
Press releases, launch announcements, and brand stories.
MEDIA RELATIONS
Relationships with the editors and reviewers who cover the outdoor world.
FRACTIONAL MARKETING TEAM / CMO
Two senior people on retainer, without the agency layer.
COMMON
QUESTIONS__
Most of our work runs as a monthly retainer, scoped to one budget and one set of priorities. A single service like paid media, Klaviyo, or content production sits at the lower end. A full Create/Convert/Operate engagement sits at the top. We also take project work: a Shopify build, a product launch, a photo and video shoot. We do not publish rates, because the number only means something once we know what you are trying to move and how quickly. Three things drive it: how many of the seventeen services you want running, whether we are building something new or improving something that already works, and how fast you need it. Tell us your budget on the first call and we will tell you what it buys, or that you are better served by someone else.
No. TheItsProject is a marketing studio for outdoor brands, founded in Carbondale, Colorado in 2022 by Dylan Crane and Max Meneley. Most of our proof is cycling and moto, because that is where both founders spent their careers: Berd Spokes, Mosko Moto, SR Suntour, TIME Bicycles, Revel Bikes, Quikrstuff. The work itself is not bike-specific. E-commerce, paid media, conversion, and email behave the same way whether you sell wheels, dry bags, or skis. The category is also large. The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis put the outdoor recreation economy at 696.7 billion dollars, or 2.4 percent of U.S. GDP, in its 2024 statistics released on 5 March 2026. If you build gear for people who go outside, your marketing problems look like the ones we already work on.
Against your own baseline first, and the category second. Shopify 2026 benchmark data, drawing on a Dynamic Yield study of more than 400 brands, puts the global average e-commerce conversion rate at 2.66 percent, with apparel at 2.77 percent and home and furniture at 1.29 percent. Those numbers work as a sanity check and fail as a target. A brand selling 4,000 dollar bikes and a brand selling 40 dollar socks should not be held to the same rate. What we report on is movement in your own numbers: conversion rate by channel, revenue per session, contribution after ad spend, repeat purchase rate. We set up GA4 and the tracking properly before we start, so you can trust the numbers we report.
No, we will not build you a chatbot. We do not build customer-facing AI of any kind, and we do not produce AI-written content with your name on it. We use AI in your back office, where it saves your team hours. We keep it away from your customers, because there it costs you trust. In practice that means order-status and support systems that route and draft rather than respond on their own, reporting workflows that assemble the weekly numbers so nobody spends a morning in spreadsheets, inventory and content workflows, and integrations built for whatever stack you already run. We apply one test: does it save measurable time or money.
Yes. AI search sends little traffic so far, and the visitors it sends convert well. Seer Interactive's June 2025 analysis found visitors arriving from ChatGPT converted at 15.9 percent, against a 1.76 percent average for organic search. Ahrefs, studying 75,000 brands in August 2025, found brand mentions correlated with AI visibility at 0.664 while backlinks managed 0.218. A 2024 study from Princeton, Georgia Tech, and IIT Delhi, presented at KDD, found that adding statistics to a page improved its visibility in generative engines by 41 percent, citing external sources improved it by 115 percent for lower-ranked pages, and adding direct quotations improved it by 28 percent. Muck Rack's December 2025 data found 82 percent of AI citations came from earned media and 6 percent from owned or paid content, which is why we treat PR and media relations as part of search work.
Dylan or Max reads it, and one of us responds shortly. If there is a fit worth exploring, the next step is a 30-minute call where we ask what you have tried, what your numbers look like now, and what would have to be true in six months for you to call this a success. You get a written scope and a price before you commit to anything. If we think another studio suits the work better, we will say so on that call and point you there.
We are a poor fit for three kinds of brand. The first wants a large team with layers, and we are two people. The second wants the cheapest possible execution of a spec someone else wrote; we are opinionated about the work, and that costs more than a freelancer. The third wants volume content or customer-facing AI, which we do not build. Zach Krapfl, co-owner of Vapor Propulsion Labs, described the fit that does work: “That crew was clearly Max and Dylan. They have done a great job on the digital marketing side, allowing us to continue focusing on product.”
Yes, and most clients do. It is cheaper to find out whether we work well together on a single channel than on a full engagement, and we would rather do one service properly than four partway. The common entry points are paid media when you have product-market fit and no acquisition engine, Shopify and Klaviyo when traffic is fine and revenue is not, and content production when the brand looks thinner than it is. Dustin at TIME Bicycles described where a scoped piece of work can end up: “TheItsProject has been instrumental in ensuring TIME delivers premium customer experience that perfectly reflects the quality and prestige of the TIME brand.”
Carbondale, Colorado. Most clients are elsewhere in the U.S. and we work remotely by default. We travel for shoots and for the first strategy session when it helps.
A scoped retainer usually starts two to three weeks after the first call: one week for the audit and scope, one to two weeks for tracking, access, and creative setup. A single-channel engagement can start faster.
You do. Ad accounts, Klaviyo, Shopify, and GA4 stay in your name with us added as partners. Raw and edited content is delivered to you at the end of each project.