Since 2007, Orlebar Brown has redefined holiday style for men, starting with their classic Bulldog shorts, known as the original tailored ‘shorts you can swim in.’ Today, the brand makes everything you need to "Holiday Better," offering a wide range of stylish resort wear, including shirts, trousers and footwear. Since 2018, Orlebar Brown has been part of the Chanel group, and has grown into a global brand, with over 50 direct stores and more than 250 additional locations in major cities and beautiful resorts around the world, including London, Paris, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Sydney, Dubai, St. Tropez, Marbella, Ibiza, Mykonos, Noosa, St. Barths, and East Hampton.
Orlebar Brown has always aimed at creating a seamless experience for their customers, whether they are shopping online or in-store. “Supporting our customers’ shopping journey—which can begin at a store in Sydney, continue online from their home in New York, then end with a purchase from a store in St. Tropez—is always our priority,” according to Jamie De Cesare, Chief Technology Officer at Orlebar Brown.
De Cesare and his team had the ambition of creating a seamless and personalised shopping experience while being channel-agnostic. They needed a simplified technology solution that could fully integrate CRM, checkout and website datapoints, while also helping them to manage multiple currencies and taxes across all of their international stores and websites.
After switching to Shopify’s unified commerce platform to meet these goals, Orlebar Brown has seen:
- 30-40% decrease in the Total Cost of Ownership
- 66% increase in basket-to-checkout rate, with Shopify Payments
- 44% of customers identified as existing Shop Pay customers, removing friction at checkout
The Challenge: Costly operations with disparate backend architecture
With an almost 50-50 split between online and offline sales, De Cesare understands the importance of a seamless shopping experience, which he believes is critical to generating recurring revenue. But the brand faced challenges with a fragmented backend architecture, inhibiting their ability to achieve their full omnichannel vision.
With several integration challenges, the brand was facing complexities across their operations. One major issue stemmed from the reliance on multiple systems to feed into the point of sale (POS) while the website operated on a completely different platform. This disconnection led to variations of customer data, and without a single view of the customer, it was difficult to fully understand the customer and provide an optimal, personalised experience.
It was challenging for us to seamlessly integrate accurate customer data across various touchpoints, which impeded our ability to fully understand what improvements could be made in the business.
As a global brand with over 70% of sales made internationally, Orlebar Brown also faced the challenge of separately managing each country’s legal entity creating a complex web of technology and business structures to maintain. This setup made it time-consuming to update prices and show local currency in online storefronts manually.
De Cesare knew something had to change to improve the customer experience without draining resources on his own team. They found themselves spending considerable time troubleshooting issues, and building an extensive team of developers was simply not feasible, nor was it the best way to manage the function. He wanted to ensure that resources were being used to create exceptional customer experiences, and needed technology that was light, easy to adopt and empowered staff both on the digital team and on the shop floor.
The Solution: Unifying channels for a seamless experience
The team at Orlebar Brown evaluated different solutions, but found that they did not align with their business ambitions, or their goal to simplify the architecture. They identified the Shopify platform as a strong contender that met several key criteria, such as app integrations, a customer-centric focus and streamlined operations. “The architecture needed to be streamlined so we could concentrate on the customer experience, rather than on the interactions between systems” explains De Cesare.
The move to Shopify meant they could drastically simplify their tech stack, freeing up the time to focus more on creating a personalised experience for customers. De Cesare adds that with the many easy-to-use apps that integrate with Shopify, the team are now iterative when rolling out new releases, noting that they can test and optimise the experience, quickly integrating new apps as they need them.
Orlebar Brown had been working with a payment gateway already, but the team felt that Shopify Payments was better integrated and easier to use, and enabled them to build the lean architecture they set out to build. De Cesare highlights “Shopify Payments multi-entity management made it easier for us to streamline processes, allowing us to build a lean architecture without worrying about multiple touch points and integrations.”
Shopify payments offered more to customers who were also more familiar with the platform. This was a significant win for us as a vast majority of our online customers use Shopify Pay, so it eliminated the need for additional integrations, development or customisation. This familiarity at the checkout immediately improved the experience for our customers.
With the help of Shopify Markets, the team is managing multiple international storefronts from one platform, making global selling easier and faster. With localised pricing, languages, and payment methods, the online shopping experience is elevated for the brand’s international customer-base.
While in store, Shopify POS provides employees with a user-friendly interface that streamlines the checkout process, and enables them to offer customers a seamless, high-end shopping experience. For example, sales associates are empowered with data at their fingertips. They can walk around the store with the customer, recommend items based on their preferences or previous purchases, and process payments on the spot.
Now, with Shopify’s unified approach to commerce, Orlebar Brown customers can be recognised at any store across the globe, and can view their complete purchase history. So if a customer places an online order in London and then visits a store in Marbella, sales assistants can easily view this information, and can better serve customers to help build their holiday wardrobe.
As we aim to provide a tailored and personalised experience to our customers, Shopify Markets enables us to recognise them through our Shopify POS and access their purchase history. This allows us to customise their visit, fostering better conversations and building stronger relationships.
The Results: A lean platform in service of the customer
Shopify’s unified commerce solution helped Orlebar Brown to remove excess, redundant technology, helping the brand to achieve their lean architecture dream and deliver a true omni-channel experience. De Cesare highlighted, “We were able to remove excess technology that is now redundant, because Shopify does it all for us. We no longer have to rely on developers, as many features and tools are part of the Shopify platform and ecosystem.”
Orlebar Brown has seen the positive impact of increased site speeds, combined with the streamlined checkout. Since implementing Shopify Payments, basket-to-checkout conversions have increased by 66%, and customer complaints about the checkout experience have decreased to almost zero. Upon launching Shopify Payments, the team identified that 44% of their customers were existing Shop Pay users. This facilitated a frictionless shopping experience, with returning customers able to checkout in one-click.
There is a clear link between site speed and web conversion, and Shopify’s checkout process is exceptional in its performance. It stands out as a superior option across the board. Shop Pay is among the most popular choices for customers, this allows them to transact effortlessly.
By integrating the POS and website data into a unified system, the team has eliminated the need to update information across sites and price books. This consolidation, along with streamlined processes, simplifies deposit tracking and tax management, contributing to a 30-40% saving in operational costs.
Shopify POS is essential in bridging Orlebar Brown’s online and offline channels, offering a unified view of inventory to minimise the risk of overselling or stockouts. The integration with OneStock enhances order management, increasing operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. The brand can now effectively track and organise stock across channels with real-time inventory levels, which is vital for their omnichannel strategy. De Cesare notes, “If an item isn't physically in the store, we can easily fulfill it from the Shopify POS on an iPad, take payment and ship it to their hotel the next day. It’s quicker, better, and offers more value than ever before.” The same applies to our website, where stock might not be available in the warehouse but exists in the store, making the product available online for purchase and fulfillment from the store.
Shopify’s simplified backend, seamless integrations, and user-friendly interface enabled store representatives to concentrate more on customer engagement, and less on technology. De Cesare notes how employees across the business can get more work done, in less time. The adoption of Shopify among in-store sales associates has been hugely positive, with the team fully embracing Shopify POS.
Overall, store adoption of Shopify has been sensational; that’s one of the biggest wins. If you have technology that is complicated to understand and use, then there will be resistance to adoption. That hasn’t been the case with Shopify POS. People on the shop floor have been great champions of the technology and have helped drive its successful implementaton.
Looking ahead
In the future, De Cesare says that his team wants to make in-store shopping even smoother by bringing together more data from a customer’s online shopping activity into their in-store experience. “Online shopping benefits greatly from native and third-party tools, but we’re not leveraging these enough on the shop floor. This is an area of future focus. We will explore how to enhance the in-store experience using our knowledge and a solid Shopify POS,” explains De Cesare.
The team is also focusing efforts on the online personalisation capability tools to create tailored experiences on the web to enhance the customer experience, based on their preferences and onsite engagements.
Retailers are good at mass communication, but connecting with customers one-on-one is super important. We aim to make every interaction, whether in-store or online, as personalised as possible.