Swanky is a leading Shopify agency with offices in the UK, Australia, and France creating compelling digital experiences for international brands.
Founded in 2010, the company discovered Shopify early in its journey after winning a contract to work with Golden Bear Toys, who had secured the license to manufacture and sell mascots for the London 2012 Olympic Games. Golden Bear Toys had a Magento website offering goods to retailers, but with no direct-to-consumer proposition they realised that they needed to move fast.
Swanky needed a new platform that could be delivered to a higher standard, quickly, and cost-effectively. After careful research, Shopify was chosen and within less than six months, the client was able to sell its products in time for the Olympics through its own DTC store.
“Reflecting on this project,” says Dan McIvor, Founder at Swanky. “It would have been very difficult to deliver the same solution in that time-frame with anything other than Shopify. It was and still is a fantastic platform.”
In the following decade Swanky has become defined by this core technology partnership - and its ability to create powerful new commerce experiences for clients, at speed. By focusing on three areas in particular, the team has been able to build solutions for brands that drive billions in collective revenue.
- Building cost-efficiency at scale
The challenge for today’s commercial and technology leader to be able to do more with less. Brands want better performing, fully integrated commerce channels - while at the same time seek lower running costs.
Swanky has wholeheartedly embraced the reality that building best-in-class new experiences quickly and efficiently was key to business success. As Dan Partridge, CEO at Swanky outlines: “We have consistently seen that people who migrate to Shopify are paying less for their commerce systems [whilst also unlocking] value, increasing revenue and improving performance through the storefront.”
For example, British business One Retail Group turned to Swanky when it was looking to expand its operations across multiple brands and territories. At the time, the group was seventh on the Sunday Times Top 100 fastest growing companies list. It had several key brands within its portfolio and worked across 13 geographies.
Swanky worked with Shopify to develop a technology architecture that enabled One Retail Group to consistently manage multiple brands and technologies to drive international commerce effectively.
Our work with One Retail Group [is] a great success story for us. A project delivered in a timely fashion, in line with business operations for the client, giving them a more performance-led storefront, but also much more efficient [store] management and well-tailored, localized, contextualized experiences for their customers across Europe.
— Dan Partridge, CEO, Swanky
- Deploying unified commerce for business growth
In 2016, Swanky became one of the first three agencies in Europe to be awarded ‘Shopify Plus Expert’ accreditation. The founders recognised this as a watershed moment for the business, both in terms of its profile as a services business and the scale of the merchants it was starting to work with. That partnership has been instrumental in Swanky’s growth.
Swanky has always sought to be ‘more than just a front-end partner’, and has increasingly identified unified commerce as an important element of a best-in-class systems architecture. As a result, Swanky may have initially started as a business focusing on designing and developing storefront experiences, but its service today increasingly centers around the entire integrated stack – giving clients the ability to manage data, products, and transactional information seamlessly.
Indeed, Swanky has built an in-house systems integration team to work alongside its engineering, UX and growth teams. Leveraging a combination of best-of-breed iPaaS solutions and custom middleware, this enables Swanky to rapidly deploy enterprise-grade solutions that bring huge real-world value to larger businesses. This approach is also vital in ensuring that Swanky’s clients derive maximum value fromShopify app ecosystem, which offers a host of powerful solutions that have been built natively for Shopify.
For Swanky, this is a crucial ingredient in the unified commerce proposition—the ability to integrate Shopify with legacy systems. Many of Swanky’s clients are persuaded by Shopify, but needed reassurance that it would be compatible with deeply-embedded business systems, some of which have been incumbent for years or even decades.
As Partridge explains, “Once upon a time, it was quite challenging to integrate any commerce system into legacy architecture. I think the quality of Shopify’s API, the way that it's built for developers first, has meant that we've been able to continue solving problems for retailers with relatively challenging architecture, and integrate [their systems] quickly.”
- Consistently focusing on innovation
To date, Swanky has worked on hundreds of client projects using Shopify, generating tens of millions of pounds of revenue for the business. But more crucially, those clients Swanky serves have collectively transacted billions.
Swanky’s success as a partner has consistently involved being challenged by its clients and vice versa— a process which fuels innovation. Building with Shopify has enabled Swanky to create a leading technology-enabled services proposition, capitalising on Shopify’s speed of innovation but also further innovating on Shopify’s capabilities.
As McIvor states, this innovative approach is also reflected in Shopify itself:
“A great example of where Shopify excels is the ability to listen to the market, listen to its customers, and develop a product that is flexible enough, and maturing quickly enough, to keep pace with both customers [and] clients.”
This has given the business the confidence to continue leaning into the market with new innovations while saying to current and prospective clients: “Yes, Swanky can support you [and] we have complete confidence that Shopify can too.”
