Founded in 2018, Bala is a creative focused fitness brand that keeps form and function at the heart of its products, which are designed to inspire movement. Bala’s combination of known workout accessories in fresh color schemes with one-of-a-kind equipment designs separate it from traditional fitness companies and help define it as a uniquely playful and inclusive brand.
When Bala identified an opportunity to partner with like-minded brands offering products in new categories, the team used Shopify Collective to solidify these partnerships and start selling more.
Since moving to Shopify Collective, Bala has seen strong results:
- Eight new brand partnerships sourced
- Complementary products synced in under a day
- 45% of total sales coming from net new customers
Challenge
As Bala quickly grew, it embarked on an ambitious mission to create a unique shopping destination on its website called The Movement Store, an effortless one-stop shop for fabulous fitness accouterments. Bala’s north star in creating The Movement Store was to enhance the shopping experience for both new and existing customers by offering complementary products alongside its own. To turn this vision into reality, Bala harnessed the power of Shopify Collective to collaborate with eight best-in-class brands. The Bala team handpicked select SKUs from these brands’ product catalogs and created captivating editorial imagery that seamlessly integrated with Bala’s own assortment. These visuals became the cornerstones of engaging social media posts/contests, compelling marketing campaigns, and an immersive shopping experience, all designed to elevate the Bala customer journey.
We needed a solution to bring this vision to life, and Shopify Collective was the catalyst that helped us to do so in a seamless and user friendly manner.
Solutions
Bala proactively engaged with each brand it wanted to partner with. The brand held 30-minute meetings with each team and introduced them to the benefits of Shopify Collective through a custom deck that emphasized the simplicity of connecting and cross-selling products through the platform. Each brand was on board after their meeting and excited to start executing together with Bala.
In collaboration with its new partners, Bala next curated a selection of products that captured the essence of each brand and complemented Bala's existing assortment. From there, Bala efficiently synced select products from each brand with no need to purchase inventory up front. The team seamlessly merchandised these new items on The Movement Store and successfully tested each flow within days. To maintain a sense of cohesiveness and brand integrity, Bala used metafields to display custom content on each product detail page (PDP). With enhanced PDPs and marketing taking off, the Movement Store came to life.
Through Shopify Collective, the initial sync of the content from the brands PDPs was flawless, enabling us the opportunity to enhance the customer experience by incorporating our own editorialized imagery.
Results
Bala’s brand vision revolves around fostering ongoing collaborations with best-in-class brands to grow The Movement Store’s product offerings and acquire net new customers. From the start, Collective’s backend functionality made integration between Bala and its partners’ stores quick and easy. By updating PDP content, inventory, and pricing dynamically, Collective took the burden of creating the products from scratch off the Bala team, thus providing a canvas to enhance with its own editorialized imagery and messaging.
Collective’s turnkey nature was also instrumental in Bala's cross-selling initiative, enabling the brand to create a cohesive destination with aesthetically-driven partners. Additionally, Bala successfully highlighted its partnership strategy throughout its marketing and social campaigns, resulting in heightened brand awareness. In the end, Bala’s unwavering dedication to creating a cohesive destination for trend, style, and functionality was made possible through Shopify Collective.
Collective is the essential tool we need to drive new customer acquisition as The Movement Store witnessed an impressive 45% of sales coming from net new customers.
