Founded in Sweden in 2011, Daniel Wellington swiftly built a reputation for its timeless elegance and minimalist design philosophy of its timepieces and accessories. The brand, who's designing all four categories of products in-house, is committed to remain a leader in the affordable luxury industry.
Since moving to Shopify Plus, the brand has seen:
- 50% reduction in licence costs
- Faster time-to-market, producing more with fewer resources
- Since partnering with Shopify, Daniel Wellington has been able to launch 12 stores
Challenge
Before the team at Daniel Wellington started using Shopify, they faced several significant operational challenges, particularly the complexity and cost of their existing tech stack, which included a headless ecommerce platform from CommerceTools alongside Contentful as their CMS platform of choice.
Large IT teams and big in-house projects led to lengthy development cycles for new features and releases. Additionally, they hosted their ERP system internally, further increasing cost and complexity. With multiple storefronts and systems, implementing product changes took months or even years, leading to slow time-to-market.
Shopify Plus changed all that.
We searched for a platform with out-of-the-box solutions that could replace CommerceTools which required a big tech team and in-house hosting. We had the same high expectations for a global presence and localised needs, but with much fewer resources.
Solution
With Shopify Plus, the team at Daniel Wellington found an ideal solution to streamline their operations.
The platform's out-of-the-box features eliminated the need for extensive internal development, significantly reducing labour hours. Another key advantage was the drastic reduction in time-to-market. Website features that previously took months or even years to develop and launch now takes just days or weeks with Shopify. This streamlined approach allowed for quicker decision-making and the ability to pivot rapidly based on market dynamics.
Meanwhile, Shopify's flexible pricing model allowed Daniel Wellington to start small and grow as needed, avoiding long-term commitments.
With support from Woolman, our fantastic Tech team replaced 59 storefronts into 12 Shopify stores with integrations to ERP, PIM, CSM and Personalisation tools in just 5 months. That says something about the improved speed in time-to-market.
Additionally, Shopify's seamless integration with various apps, such as Salsify, Klaviyo, Jebbit and Snowplow, enabled Daniel Wellington to enhance its ecommerce capabilities and marketing strategies.
The team successfully integrated systems for payment, customer relationship management, data analysis and more. The platform's user-friendly setup and the support provided by Shopify's team and implementation partner, Woolman, were crucial in expediting the process.
Results
Daniel Wellington's migration to Shopify Plus, completed in just five months, has yielded huge cost and efficiency benefits.
Licensing costs have been slashed by over 50% compared to the company’s previous ecommerce tools – and an approximate annual saving of half a million euros.
Shopify Plus with its commercially driven development, turned out to be exactly what we've been looking for. It helps us to keep up with the high business expectations we have for our storefronts, make correct business decisions and avoid wrong ones.
Looking to the future, Daniel Wellington has ambitious growth plans. The commerce team intends to explore Shopify for B2B applications and focus on personalisation and campaign optimisation through storytelling. Additionally, they have their sights set on expanding into marketplaces, leveraging social media and capitalising on features such as contextual inventory and content.