Few brands have seen a rise as meteoric as Represent.
The British luxury fashion label was founded by brothers George and Michael Heaton in 2011; inspired by West Coast streetwear, they started selling bold graphic t-shirts in their hometown of Horwich, Greater Manchester.
A little over a decade later, the brand is on the cusp of £100 million in revenue. It’s captured the zeitgeist in the process—being worn by megastars including Justin Bieber, and forming creative collaborations with the likes of Metallica and Oasis. Represent achieved it all with a laser-focus on quality, whilst cultivating a fast-growing and loyal global community.
We're creative, direct, and founder driven. We focus on the best. We're here to deliver the best product. The best service. The best quality.
Represent’s founders recognised the need for a solution that could scale with this skyrocketing success and bold ambition, and chose Shopify to support them. With Shopify, Represent has achieved:
- 50% increase in international sales
- 100%+ increase in organic traffic through localised websites
- 25x increase in site traffic during Black Friday
- 8x increase in conversions during Black Friday
Challenges: Managing lightning-fast international expansion
Evolving Represent from two people hustling to sell a limited run of t-shirts, to a luxury fashion sensation breaking £100 million in revenue, opening a 5,400 square foot shop in central Manchester and a boutique in West Hollywood doesn’t happen without hurdles.
We started with a handful of t-shirts. Then they sold out. So we kept doing that and we reinvested everything back in the business for the next 10 years. One day we turned around and we’d built a full top-to-bottom luxury fashion brand.
A key early challenge for Represent was scaling its ecommerce operation fast enough to keep up with demand. Before migrating to Shopify in 2013, the team was using a platform that required a lot of manual updates and technical know-how to make routine changes to their store.
As Stefan Lewis, Chief Digital Officer at Represent explains, this was hindering agility: “Our previous platform took too much time and manual work to update. When you’re a startup and you’re trying to do a multitude of different things, ease of access is a superpower. We needed a solution that was simple to use and ready to scale. Shopify ticked all the boxes for that.”
Adding to Represent’s early challenges around scaling was the need to expand into new markets with a localised experience for the brand’s growing and loyal community. This called for the ability to seamlessly break down multiple language barriers, handle payments through various currencies and methods, and efficiently manage multiple shipping points.
Across every site, Represent also needed a platform that could handle huge spikes in traffic during high profile product launches and peaks like Black Friday—all without dropping a beat when it came to performance.
Solution: Simplifying cross-border growth and unifying commerce with Shopify
Represent decided to partner with Shopify—feeling confident that Shopify would support the brand in driving rapid growth, constant innovation and delivering the best customer experience. Since migrating, Represent deployed a range of Shopify’s tools, features, and customisations to create a platform uniquely suited to tackle their rapid expansion.
Before 2021, the business was only selling in GBP, which was limiting sales. However, by using Shopify's international sales tools, Represent has been able to launch localised versions of their website in multiple languages while offering customers seamless payment options in local currencies.
After we rolled out separate sites for the US and Europe we saw an increase internationally of 50 percent in sales. Most recently, we launched our German translation and that added an immediate 30% increase in conversion rates and over 100% increase in organic sessions.
Represent has also been using Shopify to build a unified commerce strategy—bringing together disparate data and surfaces to build a seamless operation for the business and a frictionless experience for customers. Using Shopify POS software and hardware in their stores in Manchester and L.A., they can unite their stores and pop ups around the world with shipping points and storehouses. Shopify can act as a single source of truth for stock across multiple locations both bricks-and-mortar and digital. If customers see something is out of stock online, they can easily identify a location to purchase in-person—or vice versa.
Ensuring stock is well managed is particularly important when Represent’s pop-ups or new launches attract hundreds of members of its community—with many willing to wait overnight to be the first in line for a new drop—and can sell out in minutes.
As James Gullick, Chief Product Officer explains, Shopify POS also drives a unique experience for customers in Represent’s physical stores, “The hardware allows us to take payments anywhere on the shop floor. It moves us away from just being a traditional store with a till to one that’s truly adaptive to the different customers and changing environment each and every day.”
Meanwhile, across physical and digital surfaces, Shopify enables Represent to deliver during spikes in activity. Black Friday has been a particular focus for the brand since 2016, driving a huge 25x surge in traffic.
“Black Friday can be nerve wracking,” Stefan adds. “But Shopify has always helped us in terms of increasing bandwidth and we’ve never run into any issues around site speed.” In combination with Shopify’s trusted checkout system and multiple currencies, Represent is set up for success around crucial sales and product launches, no matter the size of the spike.
Shopify also generates even more value from those peaks by boosting Represent’s insights and analytics. Paul Spencer, CEO, notes: “Shopify is key for our data driven decision making. It has all of our stock levels, profiles, and other data in one place. And it interprets it in a way that empowers our team to make better choices and understand our customers better”.
Results: Representing the very best of fashion commerce
With Shopify, Represent has been able to seamlessly scale, reach new international audiences, improve customer experiences, and implement a unified commerce strategy.
The team can easily enter new markets through localised sites, without losing time and efficiency to backend maintenance—freeing them up to focus on customer engagement, creative growth initiatives, and new products. Sales peaks are both higher and simpler to manage while overall strategy is better informed by Shopify’s powerful suite of analytics and data insights.
Crucially, all of this adds up to an experience that puts Represent’s visionary products centre stage, while providing its global community with the seamless experience they demand and deserve.
With new major stores in Manchester and L.A., an upcoming opening in London and more stores planned for the rest of the world, a collaboration with megastars (and fellow Manchester locals) Oasis, increased localisation efforts, and expansions to its popular 247 activewear line, Represent’s stratospheric growth shows no signs of slowing.
Whether powering a new drop, a flagship store, or a local website, Shopify will be running alongside Represent and its community every step of the way.