Founded over five decades ago by visionary designer Sir Terence Conran, The Conran Shop epitomises modern luxury and refined craftsmanship. Celebrating their meticulously curated collection of contemporary furniture, lighting and home accessories, the brand harmonises heritage with innovation to create an elevated design experience.
Much like their approach to design, The Conran Shop places an uncompromising emphasis on exceptional quality and an effortlessly sophisticated customer journey. Balancing artistry with operational precision, the brand recognised the need to evolve when their previous ecommerce platform became too resource-intensive and complex, reaffirming their commitment to efficiency without compromising their signature style.
With Shopify, The Conran Shop has achieved:
- 50% reduction in total cost of ownership
- 54% increase in conversion rates
- 23% increase in email marketing revenue
Challenge
Previously, The Conran Shop had built its ecommerce business on Magento, developing numerous customisations in the process. However, with that level of customisation came significant financial and time costs, with the team ultimately spending more time on site maintenance than on creating best-in-class experiences for their customers that could drive growth. At the same time, the company was undertaking a rebrand and looking to unify how they presented themselves across channels.
With a new mindset of “reducing complexity, reducing cost, reducing effort,” The Conran Shop and their ecommerce agency Unified began assessing their options. Having examined the potential of staying on Magento and ultimately deciding the cost was too high, they turned straight to Shopify to help them deliver an experience that could elevate the business, match their design and innovation philosophy, and keep time and financial costs down.
Our greatest frustration was seeing our budgets tied up in maintaining the platform, rather than channelling those resources into creating exceptional experiences for our customers.
Solution
Working in partnership with Unified, The Conran Shop replatformed to Shopify. The team took a phased approach, first ensuring that the emerging business in Kuwait operated smoothly, before undertaking the larger migration of the UK parent in February 2024.
Immediately, the team saw improvements in the process involved in assessing and implementing solutions and features. Where previously it would have involved extensive development time and financial cost, with Shopify the business could test and roll out new apps and solutions quickly. Customers noticed the difference too, commenting on the ease of use of the new site and the simple ways to navigate through the online stores.
The ability to fire up new tools on Shopify and take a test and learn approach to see where the value is has been game changing for us.
The process of migrating The Conran Shop’s Product Information Management (PIM) system illustrates the value of this low effort test-and-learn approach. While exploring Shopify’s extensive app ecosystem the team found they could simply use Matrixify to do the same work as their previous PIM system, but in a quicker, less manual way. They found similar results when looking to migrate their previous search and merch solution, realising Shopify’s native solutions were better suited and helped them move more quickly.
The Conran Shop has also found new solutions to support the business’s growth with a unified commerce model, including rolling out Shopify POS into their physical stores, old and new. With retail staff already citing their preference over the previous system, Shopify POS is helping them to not only sell but also connect with customers, providing an enhanced, personalised, and unified experience to their customers online and in-store by working seamlessly with apps like Klaviyo.
The opportunity to welcome customers through the door, and use Shopify POS, not only to take sales, but also to capture customer details into our workflows with newsletters, personalised offers and assisted shopping experiences is really important to us.
B2B selling has also become an increasingly important revenue stream to The Conran Shop. Using Shopify’s extensive range of dedicated B2B solutions, the team built and launched a bespoke B2B site in September 2024 specifically to begin working with trade customers, initially in the UK. The solution has been designed to enable wholesale customers to purchase directly through the website, and empower the sales team to work with those customers to find the right products for their environment.
Results
Taking a unified commerce approach across their B2B, POS, and online experiences has enabled The Conran Shop to reimagine how they can operate, serve their customers, and seamlessly meet them wherever they are. The team are now exploring how they can enhance this further across their business to unify both front- and back-end functionalities to ensure every part of the brand delivers a consistent experience for each customer.
For a high consideration proposition like The Conran Shop, it [unified commerce] enables customers to be much more seamless in the way they move between the online and in-store experience, whereas before it was totally separated.
With this unified commerce model and the migration to Shopify, The Conran Shop has seen a massive 50% reduction in its total cost of ownership (TCO). Alongside that, a 54% increase in conversion rates and a 23% increase in email marketing revenue mean that the replatforming has had a direct positive impact on the brand’s bottom line.
Thanks to Shopify, The Conran Shop is now exploring new technologies for future development, including how they can incorporate AI solutions into the backend and frontend store.
We used to be cautious about going to the business to suggest new solutions. Thanks to Shopify we’re much more empowered to bring in new innovations to help us grow.