Superdry Grows Its Business on BigCommerce without Breaking a Sweat

Fashion for Everyone

Brand Collective is not just any leading house of brands in Australia. It is the only house of brands in the country that can boast having 11 sites, including themselves, on BigCommerce.

From footwear to high fashion, these brands are taking advantage of the high performance and flexibility that comes with an open-SaaS ecommerce platform. One brand in particular is Superdry.

Famous for their stylish jackets, the Superdry brand took off when world-famous soccer player, David Beckham, was seen wearing one. Today, everyday people, celebrities and even royalty can be found wearing Superdry’s unique fusion of British, American and Japanese-inspired clothing.

CHALLENGE

A need to bring operations closer to home

Superdry operates in more than 500 locations in nearly 50 countries and regions, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Asia and Europe.

Before Brand Collective received distribution rights for Superdry, all operations were funneled through the UK, including online shopping and order fulfillment. 

However, the company wanted to migrate as quickly as possible from the UK’s custom platform to one built in Australia so they could have greater control over operations, ship from a local distribution center and have a local development team that could build regional specific features on the site.

“Being in Australia we felt we needed a bit more control over operations, marketing, merchandising and feature execution. So, we decided on two things: to platform locally and to select BigCommerce as the ecommerce provider to do it with,” said Brendan Gillen, Brand Collective Ecommerce Manager for Superdry.

SOLUTION

Great solutions are never taken for granted

With Brand Collective already having multiple brands on BigCommerce, the decision to add Superdry to the mix just made sense. It would be fast, familiar and simple to get done.

“Because we had experience with BigCommerce we knew we could spin up a new site pretty easily. We were familiar with the code base and templating system, and knew it would be the quickest way to get an enterprise level platform launched,” said Gillen.

Superdry launched on BigCommerce in April 2019. Almost immediately the company began leveraging various apps and BigCommerce’s API to execute new marketing campaigns, launch new products and build their own apps for front-end merchandise presentation, fraud prevention and address verification.

“It’s nice not having to rely on a big technical infrastructure from a non-hosted platform that requires constant maintenance. BigCommerce is simple enough for us to customize ourselves and to quickly execute on the things we want to get done,” Gillen said.

RESULTS

BigCommerce delivers meaningful outcomes

For Brand Collective as a whole, BigCommerce enables them to work smarter and not harder. For example, Bazaarvoice, a review platform, was added to some of their brand sites with the understanding that if they chose to add it to another brand, all they would need to do is flip a switch and it would be done. Gillen described this aspect as a huge benefit to the way BigCommerce enabled them to build their infrastructure.

As for Superdry, BigCommerce enables them to use Checkout SDK to customize the checkout experience. And, if for some rare reason a customer is not happy with the product they purchased, Superdry built a product return portal on BigCommerce to allow customers to return merchandise.

Both Facebook and Instagram Shopping are helping to raise revenue numbers and increase traffic to the site. On either platform a product can be tagged and a shopper can click through and purchase the product directly on Superdry’s website.

And, since switching to BigCommerce in April 2019, YoY performance metrics (April–December 2020 over April–December 2019) have shown impressive growth.

• 97% increase in site visits
• 27% increase in conversion rate
• 148% increase in orders
• 146% increase in revenue
• 135% increase in customers

LOOKING AHEAD

Freedom to move forward

Superdry sells direct to customers, wholesale, B2B, B2C and on local marketplaces like The Iconic. And they are considering other marketplaces, including Amazon.

They are looking into the use of various apps and features to extend the functionality of BigCommerce. For instance, Buy Online, Pick-Up in Store (BOPIS) is planned for 2021. The testing of automation marketing programs to see how well they integrate into BigCommerce is in Superdry’s future as well as the ability to provide flexible payment options through buy now, pay later functionality.

“BigCommerce will help us succeed in the future by providing a scalable platform to support our growth,” said Gillen. “With BigCommerce we don’t need to think about it. We only need to think about how we can improve the shopping experience for our customers.”

Published: May 2021