From Shopify Migration to $18M+ in Sales: The APEX Fitness Story

APEX Fitness is a direct-to-consumer home gym equipment brand selling on Shopify at apexfitness.com. It traded as The Tib Bar Guy from launch until June 2026, when the company rebranded and migrated to the APEX name and domain. The product line is built around the APEX Adjustable Bench and an ecosystem of attachments that turn one bench into a full gym — leg extension, belt squat, power tower, nordic max, landmine and more — while the legacy Tib Bar Guy catalog still sells alongside it. The store runs on Shopify, with Klaviyo for email, OneText for SMS, and Google, Meta, Microsoft and Reddit for paid media.

APEX came to us in 2022 on a Wix site, running their own ads. We rebuilt them on Shopify, stood up Klaviyo, and took over search and paid media. By late 2025 the harder problem had arrived: the company had outgrown its own name.

The APEX Adjustable Bench started as a product line inside The Tib Bar Guy — and became the business. Three years of search authority, hundreds of ranking pages, an email list conditioned on one brand name and a paid media account trained on another, all pointed at a domain the company was about to stop using. David stated the goal plainly: “The highest value play is ranking very well for the best 'Adjustable Weight Bench' and other close keywords. If we can do that, we'll be in a good position to sell people on the core bench, and the attachments fall into place.” Rank for the bench. The ecosystem sells itself.

We built the new brand’s demand before the new brand existed. The APEX email program launched in December 2025, six months ahead of the domain move — a 23-email foundation series, then twelve attachment-feature emails. By the time apexfitness.com went live, “apex ecosystem bench” was already a real query: a brand-new term went from zero clicks to 1,195 clicks at an average position of 2.73 in Q1 2026, on the old domain.

We treated the migration as a search project, not an IT task — full crawl and keyword baselines, a one-to-one 301 redirect map, a Search Console property-change plan and canonical guidance, all scoped before anything moved. And we kept the legacy Tib Bar Guy catalog ranking and selling through the cutover instead of switching it off, so it funded the transition while APEX built authority from zero. On paid, we went where the money was, not where the volume was: spend rose 24% while attributed revenue rose 164%.

A search program for two domains at once: 58+ content pieces (product guides, nine creator-review articles, and keyword-led commercial articles across the bench, belt squat, landmine, nordic curl and power tower clusters) and roughly 55 technical fixes — FAQ schema, canonical and hreflang repairs, H1 deduplication, 404 cleanup, image-weight reduction, and a robots.txt opened to AI crawlers. The migration itself: crawl baselines, a one-to-one 301 map, primary-domain switch, Search Console migration and a sitewide brand sweep. An email and SMS engine of 248 email deliverables and nine Klaviyo flows plus full holiday campaign programs. And paid media across four platforms — a four-campaign Google Ads architecture, Microsoft Ads, a Meta testing-and-scaling structure, an influencer whitelisting program and a new Reddit Ads account.

Organic revenue grew nearly 4x in three months, across the migration — GA4-attributed organic channel revenue went from $40,097 in May 2026 to $157,050 in August, and organic’s share of revenue rose from 26.7% to 36.5%. Search Console clicks grew from 10,503 to 18,579 rather than collapsing, and the new domain reached a Domain Rating of 30 with 111 keywords in Google’s top three by early September. Google Ads ROAS more than doubled, from 3.97x in December 2025 to 8.41x in July 2026, and Klaviyo-attributed email revenue went from $40,294 in September 2025 to $189,314 in August — with email plus SMS delivering $252,883 in a single month.