Fairfax & Favor saves over £1M annually with US expansion supported by Markets and Multi-Currency Payouts

Since launching 11 and a half years ago, Fairfax & Favor has grown into a multi-award-winning brand providing discerning shoppers with the best of rural vogue. With its signature Regina boot and other shoewear, outerwear, and accessories, the company puts a modern twist on heritage classics and equestrian style.

Fairfax & Favor's loyal customer base spans town and country, with many making repeat purchases. Before COVID-19, the brand focused primarily on marketing for events that were popular with their customers, like UK horse shows. When the pandemic hit, they shifted more of their focus to ecommerce. Online sales remained high post-pandemic, with growing interest from across the pond in the US. This led the brand to expand in the US with in-person stores and ecommerce, and they turned to Shopify solutions to fully leverage this growth.

After implementing Markets and Multi-Currency Payouts, Fairfax & Favor has seen:

• £50,000 saved annually in currency conversion costs
• £1M saved annually in head count and hours spent by having single store management for multiple geographies
• US portion of international sales growth from 3% to 10% in two years

The Challenge: Managing US growth while optimizing costs and customer experience

As Fairfax & Favor saw their proportion of international sales jump in the US—from 3% to 10% in two years—the team knew they would need to implement new solutions to manage the complexity of both international in-person sales and ecommerce.

"We wanted to make sure that we were providing the best service we could to the States, because ideally we wanted an order to arrive in two or three days for a customer," says Ben Buxton, head of ecommerce and a developer at Fairfax & Favor. "At the same time, we also wanted to make sure that we were completely compliant internationally. We wanted our US sales to grow organically as quickly as they could without bottlenecks."

Another complexity the team grappled with was handling the various duties and tax regulations required when working with US shoppers.

"Everything looked rosy once the US sales came in," says Ben. "But when you're dealing with international duty, DDP requirements, tax requirements, and footwear declaration forms, it starts to become a little bit convoluted. Then when you add the point of nexus requirement—which of course, is different for every state—then you've got to take things a lot more seriously and really break it down before things spiral."

The team also faced the issue of managing multiple currencies, which they previously addressed with price books. This solution became less tenable with the prospect of unpredictable exchange rates.

"You can have somebody buy something one day and return it 30 days later as a 20-pound difference from what they paid originally, which is fine for one order. But when you're talking thousands of orders across a year on an international basis, then it all starts to add up," says Ben. "Not only are you losing out with the conversion rate at the time of checkout, but you're also losing out by converting back in order to pay international suppliers or for whatever reason. You're always at the whim of the markets and whatever the currency conversion is at the time."

The Solution: Simplicity and certainty for a team at maximum capacity

Around the time that Ben's team was strategizing about how best to operationally support its growing US market, Shopify released Markets, a unified solution for business expansion. With only three people on his ecommerce team including himself, Ben says that he was looking for quick solutions that just worked, and he found what he was looking for with Shopify.

"Markets has been an absolutely massive gamechanger for us," says Ben. "We wouldn't have been able to go out to the States without it."

The brand took advantage of Shopify offerings as they were released to grow and refine their business over time, beginning with Markets and its subfolders and price books features. With Checkout Blocks—a Shopify app that allows merchants to customize their checkout and thank you pages—Ben's team could customize product and site content according to where a shopper is located, all without requiring the staff to be coding experts.

With Multi-Currency Payouts, a feature of Shopify Payments, the team no longer had to manually adjust prices to account for fluctuating currency conversions. And they could hold funds in reserves to pay suppliers and have cash on hand for emergencies, all without having to convert currencies.

"Multi-Currency Payouts gives us a lot more flexibility to pay suppliers on time. And to order more stock in order to support the growth of the business itself," says Ben. "What might previously have taken a week can now just occur overnight because you're just making it a simple back payment rather than bouncing it between multiple entities."

Multi-Currency Payments also enables the team to predict and plan for future supplier costs without worrying about currency rate fluctuations. "You've got the certainty that the money there is the money that you're gonna pay," says Ben.

In terms of managing when and where to cover international taxes in customers' orders, Ben's team uses Shopify Tax. "This is going to be a gamechanger for us because it monitors where a customer is in terms of the point of nexus, even down to a county or town level. This would require an entire team of people to be able to understand all the different state rules you need," Ben says. "The fact that we can be completely hands off with tax calculation on a US basis means that we know customers will be paying the right tax, and we can account for that in turn without having to run into any issues with the tax authorities."

The Results: Off to the races with Shopify

With Markets and Multi-Currency Payouts, Ben estimates that his business has seen approximately £1,050,000 worth of annual savings.

Without the Markets subfolders feature, Ben says that setting up the US store would have taken two months to get a new website up and running and hand off their SEO and pay-per-click programs to a new instance. "Instead, we could just create a new store, with exactly the same products but entirely different settings, within a day, and without sacrifice to SEO," he says. "That's much better than having to see the downturn in your business because you've changed your entire US site over once on a sub domain rather than on a subfolder."

Ben estimates that the Checkout Blocks theme customization and subfolder features alone have reduced his team's workload by over half, and that he'd have to increase headcount by three to four times without these solutions. Communication between teams would also be more difficult as they tried to replicate content across different sites and inform different customer service, operational, and warehouse units. "With Shopify, you can just put all data through one system and then have a five-minute conversation internally. And make it work off of the back of exactly the same thing. Absolutely great."

Ben adds that his team has saved several hours by being able to upload international price books and ensure that all the prices are accurate at the same time. And the ability to easily promote offers and discounts to first time international customers has reduced his team's workload significantly.

"The entire ecosystem of Shopify basically works together to be able to allow you to do what you want. If you can think it, Shopify can make it happen at the minute," he says. "If we're pushing Black Friday, we can build something for one site and then customize it internationally within a day. If we had to replicate that across two different sites in a leadup to Black Friday, as well as make sure the two themes, stores, sets of barcodes, and sets of SKUs are synced and that all the stock is exactly the same, you're probably talking a full seven days. So we are talking about huge savings in terms of time."

With Multi-Currency Payouts, Ben estimates that his team is saving about £50,000 a year from not having to do currency conversion calculations every week. And they have more confidence in planning for future business expenses. "We know how much will be in our different accounts and we can account for that much more easily," Ben says. "So our attention can not only turn to other areas because we don't have to have our eyes on currency conversion all the time, but we've also got the certainty in ourselves that we can meet those payments at the right time."

For Ben and his team, the benefits that Markets and Multi-Currency Payouts bring to the business and their customers is clear. These solutions will be a default part of any international expansion strategy for the brand moving forward. "This is it, we're set for life now with Shopify," Ben says.