Blue Banana Brand (Blue Banana) is a Spanish fashion brand, founded in 2016 by two friends, Nacho Rivera and Juan Fernandez-Estrada. Starting with an online-only presence, their mission has been to empower and inspire new generations to make their lives an adventure. Since 2020, the company has opened 20 retail stores across Spain and is expanding internationally.
Since working with Shopify, the brand has seen:
- 50 percent increase in conversion rate
- Opened 20 domestic retail stores, fully integrated with its commerce stack
- Sold over 7 million euros of stock without technology concerns
Challenge
Blue Banana were new to the market. They needed to open an effective and engaging online sales channel, but one that didn’t require too much set-up expertise in terms of coding, analytics and marketing. This would allow them to focus on building their brand, community and refining their product.
Years later, having found success in working with Shopify, they were ready to take the next big step: opening retail stores. This would require a platform that could scale with them in terms of both revenue and complexity, all while still only demanding the lightest touch when it came to development and integration.
Shopify is very easy to use. Anyone can learn how to navigate it, to build reports, and analyse data. The POS [of Shopify] is so easy to set up, even a kid could do it. We’re able to reduce the time dedicated to setting up digital stores and put our resources towards more strategic goals.
Solution
Javier knew what Blue Banana needed. “We saw the opportunity to grow across channels - both physical and digital. But more than this, we needed transparency,” assessed Javier. Blue Banana adopted a Unified Commerce approach. “Shopify is our single source of truth. Having all customer data and transaction data on Shopify makes our lives easier by ensuring there is consistency across sources.”
In choosing Shopify, Blue Banana were able to build an advanced, responsive website with very little coding thanks to its solid foundations and robust ecosystem. Shopify’s 24/7 customer support access and extensive documentation library also significantly reduced any time spent on addressing issues, allowing them to focus on value driving, strategic priorities.
Looking to further optimise its conversion rates, Blue Banana turned to Shopify’s robust catalogue of apps and integrations. It now uses a range of supporting plugins, including Doofinder to optimise search engine results, Back In Stock which sends product availability email notifications to customers, and Puco checkout which reorganises payment and shipping methods based on various criteria such as order value.
I think Shopify has one of the best checkout pages in the world. Its conversion rate is higher than its peers and that is because of two fundamental reasons. One, you’re constantly renewing and optimising it based on millions of worldwide Shopify customers. And two, you have thousands of apps and plugins to help you boost your conversion rate.
Shopify proved just as intuitive to Blue Banana when moving into physical retail as it did online. Its POS and accompanying Wisepad allowed them to process orders anywhere in the store, as well as returns, without requiring customers to give credit card details. Also, having a centralised transaction and customer data pool meant Blue Banana could analyse trends and behaviours, across an omnichannel environment. This ensured a single source of truth, maintained consistency, and avoided having to constantly harmonise data across different locations.
Results
Blue Banana were able to quickly and easily build their online sales channels. Following the launch of this initial phase, the team saw rapid and substantial success.
The team’s efforts to bolster conversion rates through supporting app integrations and product hacking also proved lucrative, experiencing a 50 percent increase on their baseline rate.
Since 2020, Blue Banana has successfully opened 20 stores across Spain, its first in Mexico, provides wholesale options across Europe (and soon Mexico too), and has ambitions to expand to Argentina, Paraguay, Chile and beyond. These and its online channels (including marketplaces, social, and D2C) all use Shopify as their base platform. As the brand continues to grow and expand into new markets, Shopify will be right there alongside them.<
Building personalised online presences in new markets with Shopify is pretty straight forward. We take two or three days to launch a primary channel versus what would be weeks with another CMS. It allows us to be far more agile and focused.