“When people think of surfing they think of Hawaii; they think of bikinis and board shorts,” says Bronwen Foster-Butler, Chief Marketing Officer at Finisterre. “It’s a stark contrast to what surfing is like in Cornwall. It’s cold and gritty, romantic and rugged.” Born in 2003 in a flat above a surf shop, the Cornish outdoor apparel brand is built for life in and around the sea, with sustainability embedded into their core. Founder Tom Kay had spotted a need for this special community, to keep out the cold post-surf – and from there came the first Finisterre fleece.
Fast forward 21 years later and with 11 stores around the UK and one in the US, Finisterre has a wide product offering of consciously built outerwear, casual workwear, hardy knits and year-round adventure essentials. What unites them all: a warm customer experience. A core driver of new ideas for products and sales channels at Finisterre is listening to customer feedback, made possible with Shopify. Find out how Shopify enables the requirements of a fashion brand that is dedicated to their customers, innovation and moving fast to wards a more planet friendly fashion world.
With Shopify, Finisterre has seen:
- 11 new physical store openings
- US regional website launched, with plans for two more
Challenge
Finisterre’s customers aren’t purchasing on a whim; they’re planet-conscious and naturally discerning, so it’s important that when they land on the website that they immediately recognise they’ve come to the right place. Finisterre wanted to make sure customers would be able to discover more about their product as easily as possible, so consistency and speed were essential across all touchpoints.
And with a significant portion of Finisterre’s revenue — around 30% — coming from in-store sales, the brand needed to quickly integrate their online and offline sales data. Prior to working with Shopify, Finisterre were crucially lacking a 360 degree view of their customer base — the team required a new customer strategy that could easily integrate data across channels and third-party apps like Ometria to close this gap. Adding to this, their previous platform was cumbersome and demanded lots of development time, which was draining their small team’s resources.
Finisterre needed a commerce platform that was manageable for their small team and would enable them to create bespoke experiences without a need for too much technical expertise. Plus, with plans to expand into the US, the brand would need to upgrade to a platform that could seamlessly scale and facilitate a smooth launch internationally further down the line.
Solution
Finisterre picked Shopify for their commerce solution; since the migration, they have implemented Shopify POS, providing them with a full view of how customers interact with their brand, including what their shopping habits and preferences are.
Finisterre uses customer insights provided by Shopify to optimise their customer strategy alongside Shopify's AI suite, and in conjunction with customer data platform Ometria (as well as other Shopify integrated apps), fuelling not just customer acquisition, but retention.
Finisterre can now target both leads and existing customers accordingly; helping them find the product they’re looking for based on their previous purchase behaviour as well as their location. Through Shopify’s unified commerce solution, Finisterre were also able to discover that customers who shop equally online and in-store are generally more loyal, which allows the fashion brand to tailor their offering and reward system even more to their needs.
Time to market is also rapid: Finisterre’s wetsuit rental program, powered by Shopify and third-party rental platform Zoa, was able to launch in just five weeks, exceeding all expectations and garnering industry praise for opening up access to quality, sustainable products. It all feeds into Finisterre’s ambitious vision of inspiring a deeper connection to the sea and the Finisterre Foundation CIC’s purpose of creating equal access to the ocean.
Meanwhile, thanks to Shopify’s localisation tools and Global E integration, Finisterre have been able to streamline expansion and internationalisation. Processes and decisions around localised websites that used to take months now happen almost overnight, driven by customer insights. Combined with customer data platform, Ometria, Finisterre can even customise the welcome flow — so customers from the US or the UK, for example, will receive different messages based on where they are and what channel they came through.
Shopify proved the perfect match for Finisterre’s entrepreneurial spirit, and agile enough that their small team could easily manage any UX or content changes to the website in-house.
We wanted our team to have agency to create the changes they wanted to see, and to work with external developers on an agile and fast platform. We could see Shopify had helped lots of enterprise businesses to scale while giving time back to teams, so it was an easy choice — and we haven’t looked back.
Results
Shopify has enabled Finisterre to be more customer-centric, which ties in with the brand’s ethos of wanting to deeply understand customers and what they care about. This means providing access to hidden data about their customers – and enabling tangible business results the team previously lacked.
It also means conversations in the boardroom about where to invest – offline channels and experiences, for instance – are a lot easier as Finisterre now have the data to quantify the return. In turn, this gives them more power to innovate.
As the brand continues to grow, sustainability will remain foundational. By simplifying operations and surfacing crucial customer insights, Shopify will be there to help Finisterre scale while making the right decisions for the business, their people and the planet.
We’re able to do order fulfilment, currency, and translation with Shopify. We can launch regionalised websites without having to build them separately. I’ve worked on projects in the past where you’d spend 12 months building a new website. Now it’s like ‘Oh, you want a French website? We can do that in no time’. That’s just incredible and opens your mind to the possibility of scaling.