Fast Growing Trees had outgrown its name, but changing it meant asking customers to recognize the same nursery at a new web address. The nursery now offered more than 1,600 varieties, climate-specific guidance, and care after delivery, far beyond what its original name could convey.
Trees.com introduced a new brand and public domain while keeping the catalog and checkout on one Shopify shop. Two Hydrogen storefronts let the team test the new name and site updates internally before the public change. Thirty days later, 98% of surveyed customers were confident it was the same company.
With Shopify's help, Trees.com has:
- Served over three million customers and delivered more than 26 million plants and trees
- Processed six-figure orders through Shopify Checkout
- Reported a 6% lift in direct conversion versus the standard site baseline in the weeks immediately following the domain change
- Kept one Shopify store, two customer-facing Hydrogen environments, and one shared codebase supporting the same catalog, product IDs, and underlying checkout
The challenge
Choosing a name for what Fast Growing Trees had become
Fast Growing Trees launched in 2005, when almost no one bought live trees online. Shipping a living plant to someone's door was considered too risky, and most people bought from local nurseries they could walk through. Fast Growing Trees was one of the first companies to prove that this model could work at scale, and it helped make online plant buying a mainstream category. Since then, the company has served three million customers and delivered more than 26 million plants and trees. Customers range from homeowners landscaping their yards to apartment dwellers building out a houseplant collection, and the company also serves businesses. Over two decades, Fast Growing Trees grew from a place to buy trees into a partner for the whole yard and home, offering expert plant consultations, care guides, and more than 1,600 varieties of trees, shrubs, perennials, and houseplants, nurtured by experts and delivered to the customer's door.
The name Fast Growing Trees had served the original business, but it now described only one part of the catalog. Matt Curtis, chief marketing officer at Trees.com, also believed new customers found it hard to remember. Consumer testing quantified the awareness gap: a fictional plant retailer used as a control registered higher awareness than Fast Growing Trees. A shorter, category-defining domain offered a way to build recognition and trust beyond the search phrase that had defined the old name.
The quality of the customer experience, the quality of the product, the breadth of the assortment, and the convenience we provided as a brand were not reflected by our name.
Protecting the customer journey
FastGrowingTrees.com connected years of customer familiarity to product pages, search rankings, paid media, customer accounts, checkout, and app integrations. The acquired Trees.com domain came with useful pages and existing visitors of its own. Returning customers would need to recognize the nursery they trusted, and people discovering Trees.com for the first time needed to understand what the business sold and how its experts could help.
Selling live plants made consistency especially important. A customer's location affects plant eligibility and shipping time, while growing conditions shape the advice shown before and after purchase. The team wanted to keep paths, page structure, products, and the buying flow familiar enough to learn what the brand change itself was doing. They also had to give relevant pages on both old domains a useful destination.
The solution
Choosing headless for experimentation
Trees.com had used a Shopify Liquid storefront before moving to Hydrogen.
As the catalog and customer experience expanded, Trees.com needed more control over what shoppers saw based on their location and how the team tested changes to the storefront. That included determining which plants could ship to a customer and how soon, as well as running experiments on the server before a page loaded. Jordan Guggenheim, Trees.com’s chief technology officer, wanted to test richer versions of the shopping experience without relying on client-side changes that appeared after the browser had already displayed the page.
Headless came with an engineering commitment. Jordan considers Liquid a strong option for businesses that want a broad app ecosystem without building and maintaining a separate storefront. Trees.com had an in-house engineering team and location-specific needs that made the extra control worthwhile. Matt's marketing team valued the ability to test more responsive experiences, and he praised the site's speed.
Keeping one Shopify shop behind two brands
By 2026, that headless storefront was established. The rebrand changed the public storefront and checkout domains, logo, brand references, redirects, and customer explanation. Trees.com kept the production Shopify shop, catalog, product IDs, underlying Shopify Checkout, and commerce data where they already lived. Shopify Analytics remained in the same shop too. The project did not require a second commerce store or a new product catalog.
Shopify's infrastructure allowed us to use the same app integrations, checkout, pixels, product catalog and website code between the old and new domains. This greatly derisked the migration and allowed us to focus our engineering efforts to ensure a seamless transition.
The customer-facing checkout domain and logo changed while Shopify Checkout kept processing through the original shop. Marketing and engineering could concentrate on the address, brand presentation, customer explanation, and discovery signals rather than reconstructing transaction and product records.
The stable Shopify data model mattered to marketing as well as engineering. Jordan said native Google and Meta conversion apps did not need to be rebuilt, and the marketing team relied on those integrations while watching campaign signals through the public-domain change.
Running from one codebase
Brand settings within the shared codebase determined which logo and brand references appeared on each storefront. The new Trees.com environment stayed behind a password while the team tested it in parallel with the existing public storefront. Months before launch, they stopped unrelated experiments and aimed to keep page paths and site structure the same. Jordan's principle was to control and reduce how many things changed at once. For this project, the brand and required domain surfaces changed while the shopping foundation remained familiar.
The shared storefront still had substantial content work. Many of approximately 1,600 product pages referred to Fast Growing Trees or linked to the old domain. Rather than rewriting every record in a launch-day upload, engineers used server-side find-and-replace in the Hydrogen/React Router rendering layer so pages displayed the new references. The private storefront let them inspect that output before launch, reducing the manual rewrite facing the content team.
Making the technical switch a company-wide launch
A core team of three engineers spent about two and a half months on the build, then roughly two weeks testing and reviewing analytics and internal systems.
The company also consulted CTOs, CMOs, and other businesses that had managed comparable changes. Each workstream had an action, owner, expected timing, definition of success, and a way to measure it.
Customer introduction began about two weeks before the formal August 2026 cutover, with selected segments exposed to the new identity. Existing customers and first-time visitors saw different onsite messaging tailored to what each audience needed to understand about the change.
Matt's team gathered customer input before, during, and after the switch, and A/B tests informed how, where, and what the site said about the change. A persistent banner led to a public page and FAQ explaining why Fast Growing Trees had become Trees.com, while the team, plants, and support remained familiar.
Connecting two old domains to customers, search, and AI assistants
Search work had two starting points. FastGrowingTrees.com pages needed paths into the new identity, while the acquired, previously non-Shopify Trees.com property had useful pages worth mapping into the current catalog. For example, its evergreen and arborvitae collection mapped to Trees.com's live evergreen collection. Outside consultants reviewed both domains' search standing and the acquired domain's condition. Power Digital helped with content and technical search recommendations.
The team prepared 301 redirects, kept product paths and internal links familiar, and reviewed headings, rich metadata, FAQ content, and JSON-LD structured data. Because the new Hydrogen storefront could be crawled by SEO tools behind a password, they tested links and rendered pages before the public switch. Product titles and other public explanations used “formerly Fast Growing Trees” language to connect the identities.
Google offered a Change of Address workflow for search, but Trees.com saw no comparable standard signal for AI assistants. To explain the new identity, the team published a plain-language page and FAQ before launch and adapted Shopify’s agent-readable storefront patterns for its headless site. Soon after the explanation appeared, Trees.com reported seeing the old and new names connected in answers from Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude.
Keeping the everyday plant-shopping experience on the same foundation
Trees.com used product search, recommendations, Shopify APIs, and app integrations to help customers find plants suited to their garden and location. Location-sensitive rules showed which plants were eligible, while human experts advised on growing conditions. Shopify Functions supported pack discounts and a sitewide buy-more-save-more offer for customers buying several plants.
Shopify Checkout has processed many five-figure Trees.com orders, and checkout customization and extensions support customers making larger purchases. The site offers Shop Pay alongside customer sign-in.
The team used Shopify Analytics and its query language to monitor intraday performance in real time. That visibility helped the team review activity during the final testing period.
The results
Customers recognized the company behind the new name
About 30 days after the domain change, Trees.com reported that 98% of surveyed customers were confident it was the same company. In that research, 99% said quality was the same or better and 97% said selection was the same or better. The findings addressed a central concern of the rebrand: customers could encounter a new name and still recognize the nursery behind it.
The company separately reported 60% higher recall of Trees.com among new customers and a 20% increase in perceptions of quality and expertise. Trees.com also reported a 6% lift in direct conversion versus the standard site baseline in the weeks immediately following the domain change.
Reach shoppers beyond Trees.com
Trees.com already reaches shoppers outside its own site. Since 2025, Shop Campaigns has put the nursery’s plants in front of people using the Shop app, including shoppers browsing other products. The channel is still a small share of sales, but the team keeps investing because it exceeds their profit-on-ad-spend thresholds. Matt is watching whether the shorter name strengthens a channel that was working before the rebrand.
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