Selling suits and tuxedos for less than the cost of a rental while maintaining high-quality customer service is an impressive feat. It’s also the formula behind SuitShop’s inspiring growth story.
When the digitally native apparel brand blew past their Kickstarter campaign goal in 2016, the team knew they had to build a website that could grow with them. They chose Shopify due to the platform’s plug-and-play simplicity and its proven ability to enable high-growth brands to scale quickly and efficiently. It wasn’t long before the company was ready for their next stage of growth by upgrading to Shopify Plus.
WIth Shopify Plus, SuitShop has seen:
- 117% average year-over-year growth from 2020 through 2023
- 600% growth in international orders after switching to Managed Markets
- 32% increase in conversion rates for international orders with Managed Markets
The Challenge: Efficiency or bust
SuitShop is an online-first brand in an industry where customers are still accustomed to visiting brick-and-mortar stores. So every touchpoint is crucial for demonstrating how SuitShop offers a superior experience. Even though SuitShop has scaled to become a large brand, they still have fewer than 30 people on the team. This means operational efficiency is key to maintaining a leg up on the competition.
But five years into the business, the SuitShop team was still processing all returns manually. It was an extraordinarily inefficient process, and it was creating seemingly endless work hours and threatening to hurt SuitShop’s pristine reputation for responsive customer service.
Shipping their products internationally was also becoming increasingly unprofitable, and the team considered eliminating international ordering altogether. “I think we were spending more to just ship these international orders to customers than we were even making,” admits SuitShop co-founder Diana Ganz.
Unwilling to give up on their ambitious growth goals, the SuitShop team sought a solution that could make processing returns more efficient and help the company drive down costs without eliminating international ordering.
The Solution: Steadily adding Shopify features and apps
After evaluating numerous platforms, SuitShop chose Shopify Plus for both its robust commerce features and low costs. The decision soon paid off.
“We have around 18% EBITDA margins, which is way above average for an apparel brand,” says Diana. “We attribute much of this to the efficiencies enabled by Shopify and its ecosystem of apps.”
The team uses Shop Pay to provide customers with a fast and secure checkout experience, and Shop Pay Installments to reduce purchase friction even further by allowing customers to split their purchases up into multiple interest-free payments. Many of SuitShop’s customers are purchasing apparel for a wedding—theirs or someone else’s—and that’s not a discretionary purchase. The ability to pay in installments is helpful for people who aren’t necessarily budgeting for a suit, which makes up a large percentage of SuitShop’s customers.
To overcome their international commerce woes, SuitShop turned to Managed Markets. “We had struggled with international shipping forever, to the point where I didn't even want to offer it anymore,” Diana shares. “We were doing a different service right before Managed Markets and it was awful.” With features including customs documentation, duties management, and tax collection and remittance, the Managed Markets cross-border operations solution has solved the international shipping problem for SuitShop, once and for all. Diana especially likes the Merchant of Record service that ensures SuitShop gets warehouse pickups every day. Thanks to Managed Markets, SuitShop went from experiencing issues with 50% of orders (due to failures, return to sender, duties delays, etc...) to zero delivery issues.
A few key Shopify app integrations are making the SuitShop team’s lives easier now, too. Diana specifically calls out Loop Returns and TryNow as two apps she’s thrilled with. When Diana co-founded the company in 2016, she felt that when they shipped replacements to customers, it was a total honor system. SuitShop told customers they would get charged if they didn’t ship the returned merchandise back to the company, but in reality, there was no way for SuitShop to charge the customer. Loop Returns gives merchants control over processing returns. And TryNow allows engaged couples to see and feel the product before they ask their friends and familes to buy.
Shopify Point of Sale (POS) has expanded SuitShop’s sales capabilities as well. The SuitShop team uses Shopify POS to create orders for customers in their six showrooms and at wedding expos and trade shows they pop into. “It's been a really handy feature to easily sell our product on the go,” Diana says. Shopify POS has also been helpful for reporting and tracking inventory levels in the showrooms. SuitShop frequently helps customers with emergency suit situations, and Shopify POS gives the entire team visibility into what products are available at each store, so they can express-ship a suit to save the day.
The move from Shopify to Shopify Plus was a move for efficiency as well. While Diana appreciates the upgraded technology and additional customer support, she points out that it’s still all about the dollars. “The economics just made sense,” she says. With unlimited staff accounts, checkout extensibility that allows SuitShop to customize with powerful apps, easy-to-use B2B features and Avalara tax automation, anything the SuitShop team can think of, they can build. The sky is the limit.
The Results: Tailored experience, buttoned-up business
Since building their first website on Shopify, SuitShop has never considered moving to another platform, and Diana is confident they never will. No matter how big SuitShop grows, the small-but-mighty team will have apps to maintain their impressive efficiency, and features that help them keep their promise of excellent customer experience. Shopify powers SuitShop at every step.
Looking ahead, Suitshop continues to scale both at home and internationally. As CTO Amanda Saffer puts it, “No matter where you’re at in your journey, Shopify is the best partner you can choose to enable growth and support your business goals.”
Shopify is core to everything we do. Even our brick-and-mortar locations now, they're powered by Shopify Point Of Sale. Without Shopify, there would be no SuitShop.
These results were provided by SuitShop. Results may vary for every merchant.
