Since 1992, Boston Proper has redefined what “age-appropriate” fashion is for women over forty. Using its unique take on style, Boston Proper designs head-to-toe looks that are equal parts versatile, flattering, and high quality.
While it’s best known for creating clothes that make women feel amazing, Boston Proper generates the majority of its sales from its print catalog. Since the company launched, not much has changed; its catalog is still in print, and its CFO, Adrian Miramontes, tells us that it has influenced a majority of sales since he joined the company in 2021—which has made it challenging for the brand to adapt to the digital landscape in which its competitors are thriving.
To support its increasingly online customer base, Boston Proper replicated its parent company’s custom platform, building a checkout system from scratch on top of it. When Adrian and his team evaluated those systems more closely, the need for a platform with the right combination of out-of-the-box commerce features, infrastructure, and simplicity became abundantly clear.
Boston Proper chose Shopify for:
- The ability to implement new features in minutes instead of 6 to 9 months
- Reduced software fees by hundreds of thousands of dollars
- Improved conversion rates by 4% with Shopify Checkout
The challenge: Supporting a historically catalog-driven business with the right technology
When he joined the company, Adrian quickly identified a massive opportunity to transition Boston Proper from a catalog-driven retailer to a leading digital brand. Although the company had attempted to move into ecommerce, the custom platform Adrian inherited was finely tuned to support a catalog business. He adds, “We wanted to shift to an ecommerce-native business, but we didn’t have the tools or engineering headcount to really move away from the catalog.”
Boston Proper experienced several trickle-down effects from having its infrastructure closely tied to the catalog. Although its custom platform was the right choice when built, Adrian says it ultimately prevented the company from achieving much alignment. More alarmingly, the custom platform affected customer experience and its bottom line.
In our business, your inventory, investment, marketing, and the customer experience need to work in concert. There was no way for us to do that in the structure we had because everything was built around a catalog.
One area where Boston Proper did have full control was its checkout. Ironically, this flexibility made it more difficult for the company to keep up with the pace of innovation in commerce. Tamara Dougherty, VP of E-commerce, Call Center, and Customer Experience, tells us that her team constantly fought against a mountain of spaghetti code. “If we wanted to implement a new payment method, it took six to nine months, and even then, it didn't work,” she adds.
Choosing the right partner
Adrian tells us that Boston Proper had begun exploring a potential migration to Salesforce when he joined the company but quickly shifted gears when it proved to be overly complicated.
“We concluded that the platform we chose needed to enable us to be a retailer, not a tech company,” recalls Adrian.
Boston Proper evaluated several options after its attempt to migrate to Salesforce, including BigCommerce and its existing homegrown custom platform. However, he cited the momentum around Shopify’s ecosystem and the pace at which the platform was evolving as the key reasons for ultimately selecting Shopify.
We want good infrastructure that enables our selling experience, but building it is not our core competency. Having the right partner is important, and Shopify captures a lot of what we want to do but couldn't do before.
The solution: A stronger foundation for innovation and growth with Shopify
Adrian says that the choice to migrate from Boston Proper’s custom platform to Shopify was an easy one. So too was the decision to leverage P3 to support its already strong internal engineering team and ensure a smooth transition. He continues, “They were a critical partner, especially from a project management perspective.”
Shopify enabled us to migrate our website, the ERP, and the warehouse management system at the same time. The fact that we were able to do it at all was a testament to Shopify’s technology and infrastructure.
Leveraging best-in-class commerce features and integrations
Boston Proper ultimately chose to migrate to Shopify for several reasons:
- Our industry-leading commerce features, strong infrastructure, and user-friendly platform
- The best-converting (and easily customizable) checkout on the internet
- A robust ecosystem of applications and industry-leading network partners
Since migrating to Shopify, Adrian says he’s most excited about tapping further into the rich ecosystem of apps and integrations. He also tells us that Shopify Checkout finally provided Boston Proper with a checkout experience that just works, dramatically improving the customer experience.
“We just didn't have the technology stack to get our checkout right on our custom platform. The combination of Shopify’s out-of-the-box functionality and app ecosystem allows us to resist the urge to over-infrastructure for the size of the business that we are and want to be.”
The results: A clearer path to growth
Migrating to Shopify has allowed Boston Proper to focus on its biggest strategic initiatives while reducing the time it previously spent patching disparate third-party systems together. “We were constantly prospecting into our catalog lists rather than shifting to a digital-first approach,” Adrian adds. “Shopify and its incredible ecosystem allowed us to change that paradigm.”
Shopify was the prerequisite for us to actually address the strategic initiatives that we needed to pursue to move the business forward.
With a stronger foundation in place, Boston Proper has also seen marked improvements in several key SEO metrics, including:
- A 21% increase in domain rating since September 2022
- A 200% increase in backlinks since September 2022
- A 23% increase in referring domains since September 2022
- A health score of 98/100, indicating an exceptionally low percentage of on-site issues and a strong indicator of the overall stability and quality of Shopify’s platform
In the short term, Boston Proper is excited to explore how its recent upgrade to Checkout Extensibility can enhance what is already a more stable and flexible checkout experience for its customers than its previous solution. DeDe Judd, CTO at Boston Proper, says the brand has already rolled out a loyalty program on Yotpo that awards points to shoppers at checkout. Over the next few years, everyone at Boston Proper is convinced that moving to Shopify will allow them to focus their energy on some of their most innovative ideas for growth.
Now that we’re on Shopify, we are evolving everything from our assortment planning systems to our marketing. These are fundamental changes that will unlock tremendous growth in the business.
