Founded in 2015, Snuggle Hunny is the go-to Australian brand for birth announcements and beautiful, organic baby wraps, outfits, and snuggly accessories. With a focus on using fabrics and packaging that are better for bubs and their families, Snuggle Hunny’s products are Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) certified organic and made with an ethical supply chain and processes.
Featuring unique designs that are exclusive to their brand, Snuggle Hunny works directly with artists, creating bespoke prints and turning them into contemporary wraps, clothing, and more. The brand’s designs focus on the beauty of Australiana and the natural world, and the use of ethical and sustainable materials.
With a goal to grow their business, Snuggle Hunny was hamstrung by an ecommerce system that was unreliable and unsuited to international expansion. With Shopify Plus, the brand got the reliability they needed to confidently launch sales and drive traffic while also providing them with the tools they needed to embark on an international expansion.
With Shopify Plus, Snuggle Hunny has seen:
- 30% year-over-year (YoY) growth in DTC sales revenue
- 40% customer retention rate
- Growth in international sales from 5% to 15% of total sales
The challenge: An unreliable website was leading to lost sales
With a change of ownership in 2022, Snuggle Hunny’s CEO, Julie Mathers, embarked on a mission to drive the brand to new heights. As an online-only brand, ecommerce is core to the organization’s sales strategy, both direct-to-consumer (DTC) and business-to-business (B2B).
Snuggle Hunny required a platform that was reliable and could easily scale up or down. Mathers realized the brand needed to move to a different platform that was more dependable than the platform they had been using for their online sales.
Our old system used to give us major headaches with the site crashing, making us nervous about running big sales. But since we switched to Shopify Plus, we are much more confident with site reliability. We recently beat our previous daily sales record by 75% during a big promotion.
International expansion was also on the cards as one of Snuggle Hunny’s key growth drivers, but the existing ecommerce platform wasn’t ideally suited to cross-border sales, with accurate currency localisation proving particularly difficult.
At the same time, Snuggle Hunny wanted to implement a rewards system to foster customer retention, a task made difficult with the limitations of the brand’s existing ecommerce platform.
The solution: A scalable platform for greater confidence to grow
After hearing good reports about Shopify, Snuggle Hunny migrated to Shopify Plus in June 2023 with the assistance of agency partner Process Creative.
With Shopify Plus, Snuggle Hunny immediately got the ecommerce reliability they had been craving, with the cloud-native platform able to easily scale up and down depending on traffic demands with no fear of the site going down. This meant the brand could launch sales with confidence that customers would be able to access their online store and make purchases.
With the newfound confidence to promote sales, Snuggy Hunny was able to use Shopify Launchpad to schedule and execute sales on a frequent and regular basis. Meanwhile, Snuggle Hunny used Shopify's international sales tools, with its localization and currency capabilities, to underpin their international expansion efforts.
Snuggle Hunny also tapped into the Shopify Plus app ecosystem, implementing ecommerce retention marketing platform Yotpo for their customer reviews and rewards capabilities. Meanwhile, the brand implemented customer experience platform Dotdigital to drive additional customer engagement through automated email campaigns.
The result: Fresh expansion at home and abroad
Since implementing Shopify Plus, Snuggle Hunny has entered a new phase of growth, with their international sales—driven by Shopify's international sales tools—rising from 5% of overall sales to 15% of overall sales. This is amid a company-wide sales increase, heavily influenced by a rise in customer engagement and retention.
With a stable online store, Snuggle Hunny has the confidence to regularly schedule and launch promotional sales, a task made easier with Shopify Launchpad. As a result, Snuggle Hunny has grown customer traffic and sales revenue. The new online store is so reliable that the brand reached a new daily sales record in March 2024 without a hitch, recording a 75% increase during a major promotion compared to their previous biggest day.
Using apps like Yotpo and Dotdigital, Snuggle Hunny has grown the number of product reviews from customers they’ve received from around 200 to more than 5,000 in less than a year, while also boosting the ratio of returning customers to their online store. Likewise, the brand’s new rewards system has further bolstered customer retention.
With Shopify Plus in place, Snuggle Hunny is continuing to optimize the features they now have at their disposal. And they’re now considering using Shopify POS to help underpin plans for a potential brick-and-mortar presence further down the track.
With Shopify Plus, Snuggle Hunny saw results fast:
- 30% year-over-year (YoY) growth in DTC sales revenue
- 40% customer retention rate
- Growth in international sales from 5% to 15% of total sales
Previously, we had a transactional website. We’ve changed that after switching to Shopify Plus. Now, we reward our customers who shop with us regularly. It’s given customers a reason to come back, and they feel like part of the community. Part of our journey is making customers feel special.
