During a night drive at surf camp a decade ago, childhood friends Lasse, Kasper, and Jesper talked about how Lasse's drawings and designs (some of which you can see featured throughout this story) could be the heart of a clothing brand that was more playful and graphic than many of the logo-based surf brands they knew of.
That night they decided to start LAKOR, named after Lasse’s username to his school’s computers. There were three driving tenets that inspired the three best friends to create LAKOR: Creativity, Responsibility, and Exploration. Today, the Danish wholesaler ships its coastal-inspired apparel across Europe, growing their business while maintaining the connection that started it all.
Since moving to Shopify, LAKOR has:
- Grown every single year at a healthy rate
- Expanded from 1 to 3 markets with Shopify Markets — Denmark, Germany, and the European Union
- Adopted Shopify POS, unifying their two stores and opening another, as well as enjoying benefits like unified inventory management, simple inventory transfers, local pickup, and more.
- Grown from a team of 15 to 32 employees
- A lightning-fast site that passes all Core Web Vitals assessments on both mobile and desktop
The challenge: A complex, fragile site that wasn’t scaling
Initially attracted by the cost, the LAKOR founders soon realized that their ecommerce platform, Adobe Commerce (Magento), required extensive developer resources.
Jesper, co-founder and the IT backbone of LAKOR, found Magento to be a labyrinth of code. The backend was complex and intimidating to employees, so he unfortunately became the bottleneck for tasks that should have been simple like creating products or entering product descriptions.
He also found that Magento was much too fragile for a company that was scaling up. Jesper expressed that every vacation or family outing on his time off was haunted by the possibility of having to fix a sudden breakdown.
It’s that sinking feeling that at any moment you might need to open your laptop and fix something that broke. I was just one guy, I couldn't sustain that.
LAKOR needed agility and scalability—a need that Magento was not fulfilling for them.
The solution: A stable, scalable site that made coding fun again
Jesper ultimately decided to replatform to Shopify. Replatformings have a reputation for being complex, stressful endeavors, but Jesper remembers being excited to migrate to Shopify. Whereas coding on Magento was terrifying, coding on Shopify was fun.
And, despite being the only IT resource and learning Liquid as he went, Jesper was able to complete the migration as a side project in just a few months.
His advice to others considering a migration from Magento to Shopify? Don’t stress about making everything custom right from the get-go, because you can always iterate later.
There’s a lot of hype about being able to design everything yourself, but you spend so much time repeating patterns and designs that are right there in the theme store.
The results: Sustainable growth that protects what matters most
Switching to a Liquid site on Shopify helped LAKOR achieve a lightning-fast site that passes all Core Web Vitals assessments on both mobile and desktop. When LAKOR was on Magento, Jesper said that they hosted their site in Denmark, so if you visited from the U.S., the site likely would have been terribly slow. Now that they’re on Shopify, they get to take advantage of Shopify’s server infrastructure that’s everywhere out of the box.
I haven’t really had to focus on site speed since moving to Shopify, other than not overloading the site with apps and videos, so kudos goes to Shopify for that.
One of the other immediate benefits of switching to Shopify that Jesper noticed was the user-friendly admin interface, which felt like a leap into the 21st century compared to their previous system. “It doesn’t feel like a 90s system or like I’m working in an Excel spreadsheet,” he commented. “It’s fun and intuitive, and just such a huge upgrade.”
That ease of use is also what’s made it possible for Jesper to manage multiple sites in different markets, and even help LAKOR expand into new markets with ease. “Now when my cofounders bring up the idea to sell in a new market, instead of being overwhelmed like I would have been on Magento, I can say ‘Sure, why not!’”
In addition to the benefits to their DTC ecommerce operations, LAKOR also uses Shopify to streamline their other sales channels like B2B, through Shopify’s wholesale offerings, and in-store, through Shopify Point of Sale (POS).
We opened our first store in 2016 but weren’t on Shopify POS yet. In fact, we were using different POS systems in each of our stores. The stores were not tied together with each other or with our online store. Now we can easily manage inventory across locations and offer local pickup.
All of these improvements mean that LAKOR can focus on growth that doesn’t burn them out. “We want to do this for the long term,” said Jesper. “We all have families and we’re all friends, so we’re not trying to grow at the cost of our relationships.”
What’s Next for LAKOR?
In the near future, LAKOR is looking to scale further internationally, entering new markets in a synergy of online storefronts and wholesale retailers. Jesper adds that anyone who might be interested in collaborating, or knows just the right market or stores for the LAKOR brand, should feel free to reach out.
However they want to grow, Jesper is confident that Shopify will be able to help them do it.
We’ve grown alongside Shopify. Everything is developing so fast, so if some functionality isn’t there yet, we usually only need to wait a couple months. This is why we haven’t had to spend a lot of money or time building things ourselves—selling online, in-store, in new markets, and wholesale. It’s all stitched together on Shopify; it’s the heart of our business.
LAKOR stands out as a prime example of how companies can grow while staying true to their core values, and that sometimes the best way to grow is to simplify the essentials.