Gorilla Dirt

Gorilla Dirt isn’t a client project — it’s our proving ground. It’s the outdoor and overlanding gear brand we own and operate, built from zero into a real direct-to-consumer business. Every service Gorilla Public sells gets battle-tested here first, with our own money on the line. This page is the full teardown: what we built, why we built it that way, and what it proves.

The brief we gave ourselves

Build a store that competes with venture-funded gear brands on a bootstrap budget. No agency, no team of contractors, no shortcuts that create technical debt. The site had to load fast on a phone at a trailhead, convert cold ad traffic profitably, and run day-to-day operations — orders, returns, restocks, customer questions — without becoming a second full-time job. In other words: the exact problem every small e-commerce owner has, taken personally.

Architecture: custom, lean, boring on purpose

The storefront is a fully custom WooCommerce theme — classic PHP, hand-written, linted against modern PHP standards, with no page builders and no premium theme underneath. That choice drives everything else: the site ships only the code it actually uses, which is why it stays fast without heroic optimization plugins. Hosting is managed WordPress on Kinsta with Cloudflare in front — server-level caching, CDN, and edge security as the default state, not an add-on project.

The storefront: built to convert cold traffic

Ad traffic is expensive, so every step from click to card is engineered. Landing and product pages are mobile-first with fast media and obvious paths to buy. Checkout runs through an optimized FunnelKit flow — fewer steps, fewer surprises, fewer abandoned carts. Catalog browsing uses smart product sorting so the products most likely to sell lead every view instead of alphabetical accident. And the whole thing is tracked end to end: GA4, Meta pixel with server-side events, and first-party UTM attribution captured at checkout, so every order knows which campaign sent it.

The custom plugin suite

Nothing off the shelf did these jobs the way the store needed — so we built them. The gorilla-* plugin suite runs the operation:

• Automated returns — a customer-facing returns portal generating scan-based USPS labels: customers self-serve, and unused labels cost nothing. (Performed so well it became a product we sell: Gorilla Return Labels.)
• AI customer chat — an AI concierge grounded in live store data that answers product, order, and policy questions around the clock. (Also now a product: Gorilla AI Chatbot.)
• Back-in-stock notifications — sold-out pages capture demand instead of losing it; restocks sell on day one.
• Attribution & marketing suite — first-party UTM capture tied to orders, so ad decisions run on revenue data we own, not just platform dashboards.
• Fulfillment tracking sync — order and shipping status flowing automatically, so “where’s my order” answers itself.
• Catalog feed enrichment — product feeds for Google Shopping and Meta catalog ads, with every catalog image automatically branded.
• Store dashboard & smart sorting — the daily numbers at a glance, and catalog ordering driven by what actually sells.

The marketing machine

Gorilla Dirt runs its own paid and organic engine: Google Shopping from enriched feeds, Meta prospecting and retargeting with catalog ads, TikTok-native creative, email flows, SEO-driven content, and a newsletter with actual personality. Because the attribution plumbing is first-party, campaign results reconcile against real revenue — the same discipline (and healthy skepticism of platform dashboards) we wrote up in our attribution guide, learned here first with our own budget.

Beyond the website

The brand extends past the storefront: designed-in-house branding, packaging, and product photography; physical product development including 3D-printed accessories designed and manufactured by us; and a companion iOS app — Gorilla Pulse — that puts the store’s vital signs on a phone every morning. One small team, the whole stack, all connected.

The stack, in one place

Platform: WordPress + WooCommerce, fully custom theme (no builders) · Hosting: Kinsta managed WordPress + Cloudflare · Checkout: FunnelKit optimized flow · Tracking: GA4, Meta pixel + server-side events, first-party UTM attribution · Custom plugins: returns & labels, AI chat, back-in-stock, feeds & catalog branding, fulfillment sync, dashboard & smart sorting · Channels: Google Shopping, Meta, TikTok, email, SEO/content · Companion: Gorilla Pulse iOS app

Visit the live store at gorilladirt.com — kick the tires, load it on your phone, try the chat. It’s the portfolio piece that’s also a business. Get Dirty. Stay Dirty.