How Frankie4 conquered website crashes to achieve omnichannel success
When the footwear brand needed a more reliable e-commerce platform that could scale, it turned to Shopify.
Frankie4 is a fast-growing Australian footwear brand with a devoted customer base. Founded by podiatrists Caroline and Allan McCulloch in 2010, the brand is known for bridging the gap between style and comfort.
Frankie4’s entire range of footwear includes proprietary footbed technology, which has been designed by podiatrists to deliver targeted cushioning and support for daily wear, as well as help alleviate and prevent foot pain.
Beyond its focus on foot health, Frankie4 is beloved for its customer service, which is all about helping shoppers feel confident in finding the right fit. Today, it has nine bricks-and-mortar stores in Australia, one in the US and a thriving global e-commerce presence.
A few years ago, however, the business was facing some growing pains. Its e-commerce platform was no longer able to handle its demand and often crashed during key trading periods, leaving customers frustrated and disappointed.
Meanwhile, fragmented systems in the backend made it challenging to get a single view of inventory and sales across channels.
With ambitious growth plans for the US market, Frankie4 knew it needed a more reliable and seamless e-commerce platform that could scale and support its omnichannel expansion.
A fragmented backend
Back in 2018, Frankie4’s most pressing problem was the lack of reliability of its e-commerce platform.
“We run very big sales two to three times per year. They’re pretty large in terms of volume of sessions and transactions, and the website would struggle to scale and would crash during those periods,” said Jessica Skinner, Frankie4’s director of e-commerce and marketing, who joined the business in 2023.
Besides the cost of lost sales, this was also damaging from a customer experience standpoint.
Behind the scenes, the business was also struggling with fragmented systems in the backend. “Nothing was integrated properly. We were going into different platforms for different uses,” Skinner said.
Team members frequently had to navigate multiple tabs to find an answer to a simple question. When it came to measuring the impact of a website optimisation, it was almost impossible to make any attribution claims.
The fragmentation issue became even more critical as Frankie4’s physical retail presence continued to grow.
“There were issues with the transactional data flowing back into our ERP, and vice versa, and the retail system was sitting completely separately,” Skinner said.
“It was a pretty standard story that you hear from a lot of legacy brands, even though we’re a fairly modern brand that is otherwise laser-focussed on innovation.”
Scalability and seamless integrations
To address these challenges, Frankie4 needed a solution that offered strong scalability, seamless integrations and an easy-to-use interface that the e-commerce team could operate themselves.
For Frankie4, there was only one option that met all these requirements: Shopify. The retailer migrated to Shopify in 2018, integrating a mix of native apps and plug-ins to handle everything from discounting to wish lists to shoppable videos.
“We use it quite holistically,” Skinner said. “In terms of our main tech stack, we use Microsoft as our ERP, we have a Shopify connector as our middleware and we use Shopify in the frontend as our e-commerce platform. We’re using Klaviyo as our email send platform, Yotpo for reviews and user-generated content and Loop for our returns.”
The extensibility of Shopify’s app ecosystem means merchants can tailor their tech stack to meet specific business needs and scale smoothly.
Frankie4 uses Shopify’s native search and discovery and its built-in scheduling tool to run promotions. It also uses Shopify POS for in-store transactions and Rise for gift cards.
“We can and do build custom features, but there is always an app for something,” Skinner noted.
One of the most impactful features Frankie4 uses is Shopify Analytics. “For an idea on directional data and a quick understanding of how things are performing, I think it is strong,” Skinner said.
We can get a holistic view across all of our channels, and it can be understood by basically everybody within the business because it’s a dashboard. There are valuable insights in terms of your top-line sales, your sessions, your channels and your return rate to guide top-level business decisions.Jessica Skinner, Director of ecommerce & marketing, Frankie4
A platform built for e-commerce managers
The biggest differentiator between Shopify and other platforms is the ability to implement apps and plug-ins quickly and easily without the need for significant tech support.
For example, implementing a point-of-sale system is typically a cumbersome and costly process, but with Shopify POS, it takes Frankie4 just half an hour to get a new location up and running. Training sales associates to use the system is also quick and easy.
Because Shopify POS offers seamless integration between Frankie4’s retail, backend and online systems, the retailer can provide a unified shopping experience with endless aisle and ship-from-store services.
When it comes to Frankie4’s online offering, Shopify makes it easy for the e-commerce team to run A/B tests and roll out new features, even if they don’t have a lot of technical expertise.
“Instead of going through a whole development process to release a pretty simple feature – scoping, sprints, etc – we can find out if there is an app that will do it, try it out and see if it validates a question that we have or see how users behave,” Skinner said.
Having ownership over the e-commerce channel is important for online teams, not only because they typically have P&L responsibility, but also because it gives them a greater sense of fulfilment in their work.
It’s just such a flexible and easy-to-use platform that is made for e-commerce managers,Jessica Skinner, director of ecommerce & marketing, Frankie4
ENABLING OMNICHANNEL GROWTH
170% increase in website visits
Since implementing Shopify and Shopify POS, Frankie4 has accelerated its omnichannel expansion, more than doubling its store footprint, including opening its first stand-alone store in the US.
From its first year on Shopify to its second year, the business saw its website visits increase by 170 per cent, and since then, it has continued to introduce new and innovative features, such as personalisation and self-service capabilities.
Now, Frankie4 is focussed on US expansion, so maximising efficiency is a top priority.
“With everything that’s going on in terms of tariffs at the moment, how can we consolidate our outgoings? How can we make ourselves the leanest and most efficient machine that we can, particularly in the US? How do we still scale and grow?” Skinner said.
“I think much of that is powered by Shopify. It gives us the flexibility to move at pace, whether we’re executing large-scale initiatives or making targeted updates. It means we can stay agile and responsive to things like tariff changes or shifts in the economic landscape.”
The market leader for a reason
Over the past 15 years, Frankie4 has carved out a niche in the fashion industry by offering comfortable and stylish footwear founded by podiatrists. Its popular products and reliable customer service have helped it compete against major players and build an extremely loyal customer base.
However, the business was hampered by an unreliable e-commerce platform that often crashed during key trading periods, and fragmented backend systems that made it difficult to gain a holistic view of the business.
In 2018, Frankie4 implemented Shopify and hasn’t looked back. Now, the entire business runs through Shopify.
“Shopify’s ubiquity within the market is a huge advantage because it means that you’re always going to have agencies with Shopify-trained developers to partner with,” Skinner said. “Not forgetting the ease with which Shopify integrates with platforms like Klaviyo, Yotpo and other software solutions.”
One more reason she would recommend Shopify? “It’s able to scale with your business.”
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