Founded in 2016, BYLT Basics has rapidly grown from a digital-native brand to a leading premium essentials retailer that is helping redefine how people dress for work and everyday life. Known for their elevated everyday basics and “work leisure” apparel, BYLT has successfully expanded beyond direct-to-consumer (DTC) ecommerce to establish a growing retail presence.
The brand’s journey from pure-play digital to omnichannel retail accelerated when they unified their commerce operations on Shopify, implementing Shopify POS across each of their physical retail locations as they opened and migrating to Hydrogen—Shopify’s React-based framework— for enhanced efficiency.
The brand’s unified commerce strategy has delivered remarkable results, helping BYLT Basics:
- Scale from one to seven profitable retail locations in less than one year
- Expand Women’s product catalog 400% year-over-year, producing an immediate impact in retail sales and merchandising
- Drive over 50% of DTC conversions through Shopify Payments
- Build a loyal customer base in-app offering with Tapcart, producing 10% of overall conversions
- Reduce time spent managing inventory and coordinating systems across channels
The Challenge: Scaling while maintaining efficient omnichannel operations
With nearly a decade of ecommerce success under their belt, BYLT recognized an emerging opportunity in physical retail. “We saw this tremendous increase in demand for retail, which brought on a greater opportunity to diversify our sales channel offering nationwide,” says Tyler Muzzy, Director of Retail at BYLT.
But expanding beyond their digital roots presented challenges. First, the team needed to ensure they could maintain the same level of customer experience and operational efficiency they'd achieved online while scaling their physical presence. This meant solving complex inventory management issues across locations, implementing a point-of-sale (POS) system that could handle both in-store and online orders, and creating a seamless experience for customers regardless of how or where they chose to shop.
"As we entered the retail space, one of the big questions related to our growth was focused on our omnichannel focus and expansion," says Tyler. "When you start adding more software and systems to the mix, it can slow down the tech stack and make it much more time-consuming to try to get the data or even just the answer to your question." The team was particularly concerned about inventory synchronization between their warehouse management system, online store, and retail locations, knowing that accurate, real-time inventory data would be crucial for both customer experience and operational efficiency.
Additionally, as BYLT expanded into new product categories like women's and kids' apparel, they needed a solution that could scale with their growing catalog while maintaining the premium shopping experience their customers had come to expect. The challenge wasn't just about opening stores; it was about creating a truly integrated shopping experience that would support the brand's ambitious growth plans.
The Solution: Unified Commerce with Shopify
Streamlined Retail Operations with Shopify POS Help Bolster Sales
BYLT found their solution for delivering truly unified commerce with Shopify. They brought on Shopify POS to power their retail operations and enjoyed a smooth implementation. "To get a store fully operational on Shopify and to have Shopify POS on every device takes less than a day," says Tyler. He adds that compared to other systems, Shopify POS stands out for its simplicity, saying, "The setup and training process has been one of the best we’ve experienced since opening up retail.”
The integration of Shopify POS with the rest of BYLT’s commerce stack has helped them boost sales by extending their ability to sell beyond limited store inventories. “If you come in looking for a specific shirt, but we’re out of your size, we can order it online for you right from the POS,” says Tyler. The team is also able to gather valuable performance insights to inform their growth strategy. “We’ve created automated workflows that pull data from Shopify analytics to identify performance trends across our stores,” says Ryan Groh, Head of Ecommerce at BYLT Basics. “It’s really helpful for our data team to have access to these insights instead of having to manually pull reports every day.”
Enhanced Mobile Commerce Strategy and Unified Loyalty Rewards
Leveraging Shopify's extensive partner ecosystem, BYLT was able to rapidly develop additional sales channels without the lengthy integration processes typically required on other platforms. The brand extended their unified commerce strategy through a custom mobile app built with TapCart. The app, which integrates seamlessly with Shopify, has become a significant sales channel, driving approximately 10% of overall conversions. Combined with Shop Pay and the Shop App, BYLT’s mobile app has helped them execute on a comprehensive mobile commerce strategy that meets customers wherever they prefer to shop.
BYLT's loyalty program, powered by Inveterate, is another major growth engine for the brand, and it works seamlessly across all sales channels. “The ability of our loyalty members to redeem their rewards from anywhere is so important,” says Ryan. “By using Shopify Checkout, we have our bases covered on the website and mobile app. And now, thanks to the integration between Inveterate and Shopify, our retail teams can help customers redeem and earn their loyalty points with the simple click of a button on the POS tile, creating a frictionless checkout experience.”
Headless Commerce Architecture Creates Customer-Centric Experience Across Channels
On the digital front, BYLT implemented Shopify Hydrogen to enhance their online experience. "Since moving to Hydrogen, we've seen immediate improvements in site performance and server-side rendering," says Ryan. "Our development team saves one to two hours daily on deployment and caching issues alone." The migration has also improved their ability to handle complex product catalogs, with some styles that range over 100 variants, while maintaining consistent pricing and inventory data across all channels.
The Results: Rapid Growth Across All Channels
Unifying BYLT's commerce stack on Shopify has led to unprecedented growth and greater efficiency throughout the company. Their retail expansion has exceeded expectations, growing from a single showroom to seven thriving locations in just one year. The success was evident from their very first retail location in Newport Beach, which made a significant impact on the shopping center’s performance, driving some of the highest traffic and sales amongst new tenants. Most impressively, all retail locations have achieved profitability in their first year of operations.
The physical stores have proven to be powerful customer acquisition channels and have accelerated growth in new product categories as well. Their recently revamped and launched Women’s line has shown significant category growth of more than 400% year-over-year. "It's not rocket science," explains Tyler. "Once you come into the store and actually feel the fabric, it leads to more conversions."
The stores have also created new opportunities for customer engagement, particularly through returns. While many customers initially visit stores to return online purchases, BYLT's retail team has successfully turned these interactions into upselling and winback opportunities, creating additional revenue from what might otherwise be lost sales.
BYLT’s digital experience has seen equally impressive gains. With over 50% of DTC conversions now flowing through Shopify Payments and an engaged community of more than 300,000 Shop App followers, BYLT's online presence continues to thrive. Their mobile app drives 10% of overall conversions, providing customers with another seamless shopping channel, and their migration to Hydrogen has reduced development team time by one to two days per week and eliminated one to two hours daily previously spent on deployment and caching issues, allowing the team to focus on growth initiatives.
Looking Ahead
BYLT continues to leverage Shopify to drive innovation. The brand is currently piloting buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS) capabilities and exploring enhanced inventory management solutions through custom API development with Shopify. Plans are underway to launch their B2B offering on Shopify, further expanding their omnichannel presence to wholesale customers. The team is looking at further tapping into the scale of commerce happening on Shopify by using Shopify Audiences to improve their ad performance and drive more conversions. With a goal of significantly increasing their store count over the next two to three years and more expansion across the US and abroad, BYLT's unified commerce strategy is just getting started.
Given recent growth within our omnichannel approach, it’s made us realize that we need to simplify our tech stack to what’s best fitting within our business. We’ve put a strong focus into utilizing multiple Shopify solutions and consolidating within their stack as we continue to expand our channel offerings. It’s saved our team a tremendous amount of time, while we’ve been able to further develop our longstanding partnership with Shopify to the BYLT loyal online and in-person.
