How retail giant Brand Collective consolidated 19 brands onto Shopify
With a portfolio of 65 brands, 300 physical stores and 19 direct-to-consumer ecommerce brands, Brand Collective is one of Australia’s largest retail groups.
Running the gamut from footwear to apparel with brands including Shoes & Sox, Hush Puppies, Black Pepper and Breakaway, as well as a portfolio of licensed brands such as Everlast and Superdry, the business has a diverse customer base that expanded in 2022 when it merged with PAS Group.
The retail powerhouse was sitting on a gold mine of opportunity. To realise it first, the business needed to untangle a complex ecommerce technology setup and create a streamlined back-end operation.
Aaron Gard has more than 20 years of retail experience under his belt, having worked with brands including Country Road and Seed Heritage. Last year, he joined Brand Collective as Group General Manager for Digital and Ecommerce.
Gard said: “We had a number of websites running Shopify, BigCommerce, Salesforce and Magento with multiple middleware technologies and email marketing platforms. Reducing that complexity has been a massive undertaking.”
In 2023, Brand Collective kicked off a program of work to standardise its ecommerce tech stack, which saw the mass migration of all brands within its portfolio to Shopify.
Consolidating multiple platforms into one
From content management systems to payment gateways and everything in between, research suggests the average ecommerce store has between five and 20 core tools under the hood. That’s a lot to manage when you have one store, but when you have 19 operating on a myriad of different platforms, that’s not merely a challenge. It’s chaos.
“You have an email marketing platform, performance marketing platforms, CRM and all of your martech solutions. And then you need integrations to connect it all together. Managing those integrations and normalising the data so that your technology solutions speak the same language is the hardest part.Aaron Gard, Group GM digital & ecommerce, Brand Collective
With a diversity of platforms across brands, executing marketing strategies that relied on test and learn was arduous and unpredictable. From a developer standpoint, theme variations and integrations meant routine tasks such as launching promotions stole time that could have been directed to optimising the store’s customer experience.
There was also the concern of site reliability to contend with, as Brand Collective rolled the dice in heavy traffic periods at the mercy of third-party hosting.
Consolidation wasn’t simply a nice-to-have. It was a commercial imperative.
A unified platform powered by Shopify
Brand Collective selected Shopify to be the backbone of its 19 ecommerce brands, migrating them as part of a wider technology transformation.
Gard said: “Shopify is able to deeply integrate with other technologies in a seamless and straightforward way that makes the whole process a lot easier.”
Brand Collective employed Shopify theme blocks to create site sections with capabilities such as video hosting that could be replicated and adapted across multiple brands. Similarly, Shopify’s native features supercharged functionality from one store to another with consistent architecture, allowing for custom applications to be built and delivered right across the business.
With built-in currency conversion and tax calculation tools, Shopify Markets simplified the process for Brand Collective to build region‑specific storefronts at speed, enabling the expansion into new markets without extensive developer resources.
The migration would also see Brand Collective replace its previous payment platform, Braintree, with Shopify Payments, eliminating the hassle of working with multiple third-party payment providers. With Shopify Payments, Brand Collective customers can easily check out with major credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, or Shop Pay – Shopify’s accelerated one-tap checkout solution.
Streamlining one brand at a time
The standardisation of Brand Collective’s tech stack began in 2023, led by the former Group GM of Digital and Loyalty. When Gard joined the business, he drove the transition of the remaining brands as they moved across to Shopify, one brand at a time.
Gard says: “Across the entire portfolio, we have the same ecommerce platform, same middleware technology, email marketing and performance marketing solutions. It’s put us in a really good position.”
On choosing Shopify, Gard says: “I’ve worked with pretty much every enterprise-grade ecommerce platform in the market, and Shopify is by far the easiest and most cost-effective to use. From an operational standpoint, it’s easy to build engaging customer experiences. From a fraud standpoint, it’s the most secure. And it makes our job as retailers just so much easier.”
“I’ve worked with pretty much every enterprise-grade ecommerce platform in the market, and Shopify is by far the easiest and most cost-effective to use. From an operational standpoint, it’s easy to build engaging customer experiences. From a fraud standpoint, it’s the most secure. And it makes our job as retailers just so much easierAaron Gard, Group GM digital and ecommerce, Brand Collective
$200K+ IN SAVINGS AND YEAR-ON-YEAR SALES GROWTH
Two years on, Brand Collective is seeing significant year-on-year sales growth, which Gard attributes to Shopify’s ease of use.
Gard said: “Shopify provides a framework and a set of tools that make test and learn activities much more straightforward. It makes it easy for us to focus on the online user experience without the heavy technical overheads through development resources or agency costs. We can make those changes, improve the customer experience and not have to worry about all the stuff behind the scenes.”
In the past, learnings and innovations from one brand in the Brand Collective portfolio were difficult to replicate, given the inconsistent architecture and custom applications varying across brands. That is now a thing of the past.
Gard said: “When you’ve got so many brands, if there’s a learning with one brand, we can take that learning and quickly deploy it across the whole portfolio. The conversion rate is up across the entire portfolio of brands, which is leading to incremental increases in sales.”
Consolidation has had a measurable impact on resourcing across the business. Gard said: “There was significant cost savings from a licensing perspective and significant improvements in having just one vendor to speak to. It’s made the process of managing such a large portfolio of ecommerce websites so much easier.”
There’s also been the added benefit of a 99% reduction in fraudulent chargebacks with thanks to Shopify Payments.
“Shopify Payments has a deeply integrated fraud prevention mechanism. By migrating all of our brands, we eliminated fraud almost entirely. Chargebacks were costing us about $200,000 a year, and that’s gone now,” said Gard.
Brand Collective’s simplified and efficient tech stack has laid the foundation for the group’s growth ambitions, with Gard noting: “Now we can acquire and launch brands quickly. We can stand them up or shut them down if they’re not working. It has created a real sense of agility at an enterprise level that supports the multi-brand ethos Brand Collective employs.”
Brand Collective is about to launch an all-new brand that Gard says came to life in record time. He said: “It’s taken us six months from the initial idea to getting it to market. We’re planning to launch another 13 websites in the next 18 months to two years. And that’s all possible because of that standard technology stack we now have.”
The shift also led to significant time savings due to a reduction in required website maintenance. Gard said: “Behind the scenes, Shopify is doing all of the important maintenance for us.”
This is freeing Gard and his team up to focus on further optimising the customer experience, where additional revenue gains can be made. He says: “As opposed to spending a lot of time doing software upgrades and payment gateways and checkouts, that’s all managed by Shopify. It allows us to focus on the online customer experience.
My top two priorities are giving our customers the best possible experience and the profitability of our business. What Shopify has enabled us to do is actually focus on those things without being distracted by the technology limitations and distractions that come with other ecommerce platforms. It’s been a real game changer for usAaron Gard, Group GM digital and ecommerce, Brand Collective
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