Stride Consumer isn’t your ordinary private equity firm. Made up of a group of growth equity investors, they focus on four main verticals—food and beverage, beauty and personal care, active outdoor and lifestyle, and multi-unit services. For each vertical, there’s an operating partner with decades of experience in the space who’s ready to roll up their sleeves and work with what Stride calls passion brands.
“We’re looking for businesses that have really strong customer loyalty and word of mouth, and that’s usually because they have a superior product,” said David Retter, operating partner at Stride. “These brands have found a place in the market where there’s a change in consumer sentiment or interests, and they’ve pinpointed it.”
Stride helps these brands fuel and expand their growth—all with Shopify as their trusted partner. “We’re looking at what revenue-driving opportunities exist for a brand. And when we meet with Shopify to talk about strategy, we’ve found that they consistently have solutions that allow us to realize our growth ambitions.”
As a result of partnering with Shopify, Stride Consumer has achieved value for their portfolio companies such as:
- 2x increase in conversion
- 10,000 new customers to date while achieving target return on ad spend (ROAS)
- 6x increase in revenue in 12 months
- 40% increase in organic traffic
- $10 increase in average order value (AOV)
The challenge: Navigating custom builds and technical debt
Before partnering with Shopify, Stride was bogged down with custom work. Other platforms weren’t keeping pace with the rate of ecommerce, so they often found themselves building features using internal developer teams that only drove costs up.
“Other platforms didn’t have the answers we needed,” said David. “All in all, we were doing a ton of work and spending a ton of money, and we still weren’t able to keep pace with some of the bigger brands at the enterprise level that were leading in terms of what the ecommerce experience needed to be.”
Many of Stride’s brands also come to them with significant technical debt. But because Stride is in the business of growing brands, they were in need of scalable tech solutions that were low lift with low developer costs that would still help them stay leading edge across their portfolio.
Technical debt can mean a lot of different things. For example, companies may come in with sites for different regions built on different platforms. Or their sites don’t talk to each other, and their data is hidden in black boxes across various platforms. Or in the case of Skinfix, the disparate websites split the ecommerce experience between the United States and Canada.
When acquiring new portfolio companies, Stride sees potential in brands that may have technical debt or an outdated ecommerce platform. They have the products—they just need the right strategy and technology to attract and convert buyers. And that’s where Shopify comes in.
The solution: Making the most out of innovation
Instead of feeling frustrated looking for capabilities that aren’t available, Stride now often finds themselves trying to keep up with what Shopify has to offer. “What has really continued to impress me about Shopify is that every single day, I'm learning something new that is on trend, that's a new capability, and that's going to allow us to continue to stay best-in-class and stay leading-edge across our brands.” Stride brands adopt these features as they are added to Shopify’s core functionality, which means no development work and much leaner internal development resource needs.
This learning takes many forms, often through the newsletters and webinars that Shopify delivers as part of the Private Equity Program, as well as daily chats with Shopify team members over Slack. That way, Stride can share goals like driving more average order value (AOV) and testing shipping thresholds—or ask questions after getting deep into the weeds of a brand’s admin—and get recommendations straight from the source.
But the most impactful learning opportunity in David’s mind was when Shopify participated in the Stride Consumer Marketing and Ecommerce Summit. Presenting on the theme of how to get the most value from a storefront, representatives from Shopify’s Private Equity Program shared the latest capabilities on the platform, including Shopify Audiences, Shopify Collective, and Shop App advertising. Shortly after, Patrick Ta Beauty launched a Shop Ads campaign that has acquired over 10,000 new customers to date while achieving their target return on ad spend (ROAS).
"We’re constantly coming to the Shopify team. They’ve been instrumental in keeping up on platform capabilities, connecting us to partners for diligence needs, and answering questions that come up from our deal team around all things Shopify."
—David Retter, Operating Partner, Stride
For David, the partnership has been instrumental to the portfolio’s success—both in terms of using the technology and getting strategic insights from the Shopify team. It’s this success that also explains why Stride now almost exclusively migrates their portfolio brands to Shopify. With everything they learn, they’re looking to see how they can put it into practice.
Building from foundations to copy and paste-ability
Stride has unlocked what David calls the copy and paste-ability of Shopify features. When one of their ecommerce leads finds a solution that works for a brand, Stride's operating team looks to apply it across the portfolio.
"The fact that someone can go in and immediately activate a feature or run a trial on a new app product in minutes—that’s the pace of evolution and innovation that Shopify creates. Having the ability to test different things within the Shopify ecosystem with a low lift is incredible from where this industry was not too long ago."
—David Retter, Operating Partner, Stride
An example of this copy and paste comes from Skinfix. Stride worked with Skinfix to create a quiz that helps customers build a skincare routine based on their skin type, concerns, and desired benefits. It not only matches the right products with the right customers but also allows Skinfix to gather valuable data to customize their content and personalize their website to specific audiences.
Stride has since implemented the quiz into other brands across industries, including hair care with Odele and makeup with Patrick Ta. “That same plugin we used to build the Skinfix quiz is what we use across the portfolio,” said David. “Now they all have quizzes, and that’s added a layer of richness to their customer data that’s pretty incredible.”
It’s not just quizzes that boosted efficiency across Stride’s portfolio. Many of their brands are also tapping into new ways to measure and share consumer feedback. One way is by integrating social proof onto their sites. With Shopify, consumers can play videos from people across social media—including customer videos, reviews, and testimonials from TikTok, Meta, and Instagram—all without leaving the product page. They’re also expanding their media channels to include less directly measurable avenues like out-of-home, TV, and radio. These portfolio brands are implementing post-purchase surveys that ask customers how they heard about the product as a way to keep tabs on which advertising channels are working.
Matching business goals to Shopify themes
For brands that need a full site redesign, Stride leans on Shopify themes. “Themes have unlocked a whole new level of efficiency for our ecommerce managers,” said David. “There's a lot of plug and play in the WYSIWYG editors that’s given our day-to-day teams the confidence to move modules around and still keep the aesthetic of the site towards its original intent.”
Specifically, David raves about the site refresh for Patrick Ta that brought in a fresh look and style for the brand. “Patrick Ta’s business is built on the fact that Patrick is so thoughtful about his product. We needed a theme that would allow us to display that in both editorial and video,” said David. “I was floored by how stylistically strong the themes were. And beyond that, it was helpful for us to see how certain themes would work depending on what our goals were and how the templates had commerce features to achieve them.”
The theme that Stride and Patrick Ta selected worked perfectly. Just 12 months after the new site launched, Patrick Ta saw a 6x increase in revenue—an incredible growth metric for Stride’s portfolio.
Cleaning up operationally
As a private equity firm, Stride’s core goal is to create value for their portfolio companies. And by partnering with Shopify, they’ve been able to uncover value opportunities by streamlining operations.
Take Skinfix's migration to Shopify, for example. The clean, clinically proven skincare brand sells in both the United States and Canada. But before Stride’s investment, their two separate sites operated on different platforms that didn’t talk to each other.
Stride took the opportunity to consolidate the sites onto Shopify. Now, Skinfix can seamlessly toggle between them on the Shopify platform. And because the two sites share customer data, Stride can easily access insights such as retention metrics and order cohorts.
“That was probably the heaviest lift we took on, but it's been a real game changer,” said David. “Streamlining the site management and upkeep made all of our lives easier.” Not only are Skinfix’s sites now easier to manage. They’re also more profitable. Almost immediately after launching the new sites, Skinfix saw their conversion rate double.
Growing through new channels
Stride focuses on identifying new revenue-driving opportunities for their brands to explore and expand into—whether that means helping businesses that started online open physical retail stores or expand from retail into other channels.
"Direct-to-consumer storefronts would be almost unattainable for some of our brands without Shopify. If you think about what their core competencies are as a brand, it’s typically selling into retail partners through brick and mortar stores. They’re not primarily thinking about what their ecommerce could or should be and certainly not how to fulfill orders or flow them into their finance system. Shopify brings all that to you immediately."
—David Retter, Operating Partner, Stride
Stride learned just how seamless Shopify technology can be with Jeni’s Ice Cream. Originally starting with their Scoop Shops, Jeni’s successfully expanded into wholesale and ecommerce to reach more customers. As their online sales took off in 2020, it became crucial to connect their customer data across retail and ecommerce. Their old POS system couldn't handle the data capabilities they needed, so Stride migrated them to Shopify. Now, Jeni’s can engage customers across multiple channels, increasing the percentage of customers shopping across multiple channels by double digits.
And it’s not just Jeni’s that’s seen the benefits of Shopify’s platform. Almost none of the brands in Stride’s portfolio have full-time development resources. When one has an issue, Stride’s ecommerce managers can search in the Shopify app store for products that solve it. “Our ecommerce managers moonlight as product managers,” said David. “Shopify allows us to move incredibly quickly because that app store is a really powerful feature for anything we want to build on top of what Shopify offers out of the box.”
It’s also just as simple for Stride to turn features off when they’re not using them. “Shopify makes it easy to understand where you’re spending money and what the value is for those things,” said David. Because features are easy to plug in, Stride can easily trim away any that don’t match their long-term growth initiatives.
The results: Taking good and making it even better
Even when brands are performing well, Stride sees value to gain from switching to Shopify. Truewerk proved to be one of those brands.
As a maker of high-performance workwear, Truewerk was already disrupting the market with superior products. They had a healthy direct-to-consumer business with a site that was performing well. But they also had a lot of technical debt that was slowing them down from achieving further success.
“As we made the transition to a theme-based ecosystem on Shopify 2.0, not only did we see that their core metrics were held and healthy, they got all the benefits behind the scenes with the mechanics of store updating,” said David.
With support from Stride, the marketing team at Truewerk now has greater control over their site's content, merchandising, and marketing thanks to seamless updates within Shopify templates. This flexibility allows them to focus more on enhancing the site's framework and messaging, which has leveled up their SEO visibility. Since transitioning to Shopify 2.0, they've seen a 40% increase in organic traffic.
Another win for Truewerk—and therefore for Stride—has been increasing their basket size. They’ve enhanced their website with smart features that suggest complementary product combinations. For instance, when customers purchase work pants, the site intelligently recommends the matching jacket that’ll gear them up for their jobsite. Now, Truewerk’s average order value (AOV) is up by over $10.
As for the future, David is focused on data—and specifically doing more with Shopify’s data ecosystem within Shopify Audiences to drive acquisition and retention.
"When you think about customer data, particularly online buying behavior, I can't think of anyone but Shopify that's going to be able to rival [Meta and Amazon] for brands that are looking to drive value into their own ecommerce on direct-to-consumer. That's the opportunity."
—David Retter, Operating Partner, Stride
