At the age of 19, designer Jenni Kayne founded her eponymous California lifestyle brand Jenni Kayne. What started as a clothing and footwear brand in 2002 soon grew to include luxurious wardrobe essentials and accessories. The brand further expanded into home furnishings in 2017 with Jenni Kayne Home, and most recently, started a skincare line called Oak Essentials.
Connecting with customers both online and in-person is an important part of the brand’s strategy. “We’ve always tried to be an omnichannel brand,” says Sam Mella, Director of Home Experience at Jenni Kayne. But as new product launches and more store openings accelerated their growth, it became clear that Jenni Kayne needed a more scalable platform that could unify their sales channels and operations.
“As we were scaling, we needed an ecommerce platform that integrated with the point-of-sale (POS),” says Sam. She notes how this is especially true in the home category, explaining that “People experience holidays and create memories in their homes. They need time to research the items that are going to become part of these memories before buying them. Our customers often do this research both online and in-person, so we have to ensure we’re providing a cohesive experience regardless of where they engage.”
Since migrating to Shopify Plus and Shopify POS, Jenni Kayne has:
- More than doubled their brick-and-mortar retail store presence across US
- Increased engagement with shoppers using unified customer profiles
- Removed friction in how staff accessed inventory details online and in-store
- Improved partnerships with Trade Program members through the ease of creating product quotes with imagery and branding
The Challenge: Unifying inventory and simplifying multi-location management
Jenni Kayne Home's understated, California-inspired aesthetic was resonating from coast to coast. But the team wasn’t confident their commerce stack could handle the rapid growth they planned or convey the brand’s luxe lifestyle experience across every channel. They needed a more comprehensive and flexible solution. “It was important to have our ecommerce and POS systems unified so our online and physical stores could seamlessly communicate,” says Sam. She adds that customizability was essential too, saying “We needed to make sure every touchpoint served our customers’ needs and matched the look and feel of the brand.”
The unique profiles of home goods customers were driving much of this push toward innovation.
“You don’t buy a living room overnight,” Sam points out, highlighting how customers spend a lot of time weighing options for their homes. “But if we had insights about these customers based on our previous interactions online and in-person, then we could follow up and thoughtfully guide them through the purchasing journey.” Within the home category in particular, the team also has to balance the different needs of regular buyers and those “in the trade.”
“We offer an exclusive Trade Program that gives interior designers discounts on furniture and home décor year-round,” says Sam. “These buyers tend to be looking to furnish an entire living space while our regular customers might want just a single chair.” As they continued opening more stores and expanding into new product categories, the team needed to be able to cater to these plus the endless variety of other needs unique to each of their customers. They turned to Shopify to help them do just that.
The Solution: Shopify improves customer experience with omnichannel capabilities
Jenni Kayne unified their sales channels and operations with Shopify during a transformative time in the brand’s history. Sam emphasizes how the sales team adapted well to the change and how it helped facilitate the growth of the business. “Compared to our previous system, Shopify POS is super user friendly,” she says. “Our retail staff were trained very quickly, and rolling it out to new stores has always been a smooth process. We notice a lot of new hires have used Shopify POS before too, and if they haven’t, they catch on very quickly”
Sam also shares how the integration of Jenni Kayne’s ecommerce and POS systems paid dividends by allowing for endless aisle shopping. “Furniture can be big, so we can’t always keep every item in the store,” she says. “But if we can see a piece is in stock in our warehouse then we can easily ship it to the customer’s home. That seamless flow has helped our team sell with more confidence and enabled a more relaxed, luxurious shopping experience for our clients.”
With Shopify POS, Jenni Kayne can also build deeper relationships using unified customer profiles, easily retrieved by the team. “We use tags to identify whether a client is part of our Trade Program, Home Membership Program, and other things like that,” says Sam. “So if a client is looking at sofas, pillows, or anything for the home and they’re not a member, then we can quickly and easily find that out and suggest the program to them, which is super useful.”
Jenni Kayne has further improved the shopping experience in their stores and helped the team provide higher levels of service by taking advantage of the customizability of Shopify POS. “Creating different tiles in the POS for adding discounts and other common tasks is great for ease of use, and adding imagery is super helpful as well,” says Sam. “We have images of all our products in the POS so when we type in a SKU the image pops right up. You can’t really make mistakes, which is very nice.” Making the team’s job easier with features like these allows them to keep focused on their customers.
But if she had to pick a favorite customization, Sam is partial to the brand’s system for quotes. “We created an amazing quoting tool in the admin portion of Shopify POS that allows us to print out a beautiful quote with imagery and branding,” she says. The tool is particularly valuable in serving Trade Program members, Sam notes, further sharing how “We can print or email PDF quotes for interior designers right from the POS that are really easy for them to pass along to their clients.”
Finally, making sure that Jenni Kayne’s elevated aesthetic sense always comes through for customers regardless of how they interact with the brand has always been crucial. And their digital catalog provides a perfect example of how the team accomplishes this with Shopify. “In addition to the paper catalogs that we send to customers’ homes, we created a digital catalog that we showcase on our website,” says Sam. “It’s great for our teams in the stores because they can view it on an iPad and walk the client through product collections in a very organic way. Each page features beautiful lifestyle imagery and all the other information they would need, including an in-depth description and pricing. For outdoor items and others that are challenging to keep in the store, the digital catalog is extremely helpful.”
The Results: Improving sales and customer relationships
Considering how Jenni Kayne has more than doubled their retail store presence in just a few years since adopting Shopify, nothing seems to be slowing them down. “The smoothness of checkout has really improved thanks to Shopify POS,” says Sam. “There’s never any guessing or question marks since the system is so reliable.” On top of that, Shopify has put a variety of robust commerce tools at the team’s fingertips to help boost sales even more.
“Shopify’s client history reporting has been really useful in helping us get to know our customers better and build on the sale,” says Sam. “Deep down, relationships are the most important thing to us, and with Shopify, we can take the time to build those relationships as clients furnish their homes over the span of months and even years by always following up, making sure they’re happy, and then talking about building out the rest of the space.”
As Jenni Kayne enters their third decade of bringing the essence of California living to the world, the brand is well-positioned to win over more customers regardless or where they engage. “What excites me most about being on Shopify is having that true omnichannel experience. Our clients have the ability to explore beautiful imagery and videos on the website and it translates seamlessly to the store where everything and everyone is on the same page,” says Sam. “We’re making those Jenni Kayne lifestyle moments feel more real and achievable to our clients and helping them bring those moments home.”
Shopify has helped us fulfill our omnichannel vision and provide a customer experience that is smooth and seamless. We can sell everything from clothing to dinner tables all in one system. Everything just feels easy for our clients and our team.