How this prominent apparel brand increased total sales by 45% with Pack
Discover how this leading lifestyle and athleisure company — rivaled by brands like Lululemon and Vuori — used Pack to build a blazing-fast custom storefront that was easy to set up and manage.
Margaret Julian
Director of Product Marketing
About
Featured in publications like Golf Digest and Sports Illustrated, this mid-size apparel brand is renowned for its premium lifestyle and athleisure products. With a strong footprint in college athletics, this brand also has a diverse roster of sponsored athletes across several sports, including basketball, football, golf, and lacrosse.
Challenge
With site traffic on the rise and well-established competitors, the brand needed to evolve past its theme storefront
Like many DTC apparel brands, this brand started its legacy on a Shopify theme. But, as the brand began rapidly expanding from its signature polo shirts into athleisure and other lifestyle clothing, the team saw a significant spike in demand and site traffic.
As a result, Senior Developer Alejandro J. spent most of his time balancing the onsite experience with site speed. Since most competitors were already on headless storefronts, he knew the brand was at a significant disadvantage with diminishing returns on development.
“When I saw the revenue numbers and analyzed how we stacked up against the competition, I realized it was essential for us to upgrade to a higher caliber site.”
Alejandro knew it was time to evolve from the brand's Shopify theme to a custom storefront. However, he’d gone down a headless path before with lackluster results.
I was always interested in headless builds, but until recently, they were really difficult to build and maintain—especially for a single developer.
As a solo developer who's spent his career building theme-based storefronts, he needed a solution that combined the benefits of a React-based frontend with Shopify’s user-friendly interface:
After dabbling in solutions like Builder.io and Shogun, Alejandro was disappointed at how broad the tools were and how much they deviated from Shopify’s UI. That's when a colleague introduced him to Pack, and after a 15-minute demo, he knew he'd found the perfect solution to his dilemma.
"I loved how familiar Pack was to Shopify — 99% of the functionalities we needed were provided out of the box and were much lower lift to implement compared to their competition."
Solution
Pack pairs the speed and flexibility of a custom storefront with the familiarity of Shopify
This emerging apparel brand partnered with Pack to support its exponential growth with a blazing-fast custom storefront. Pack's Digital Experience Platform proved vital in helping the brand simplify frontend customization while maintaining blazing-fast site speeds that enabled them to compete with other high-profile clothing labels.
The brand attributes its success to three key benefits:
Benefit #1: A visual layer that makes content management easy
Pack's visual layer helps Alejandro see precisely what content (or code) will look like as he types it out. Now, he spends far less time worrying if the changes made in staging will accurately reflect the live site – a significant time saver. Even better, Pack's visual layer is so easy to use that even Alejandro's marketing team can make frontend changes without compromising the site's functionality.
“I knew I didn’t want to sacrifice Shopify’s customizer experience because I couldn’t be in charge of all site modifications— it would be unrealistic to keep up with daily or weekly changes to the site as a team of one, which is what the brand needed and what customers expect. If you have a good front end developer in Pack who knows React, you don’t need a whole team.”
Benefit #2: A familiar, React-based frontend with workflows that speed up development — all purpose-built for Shopify
As a veteran Shopify developer, Alejandro was well acquainted with the challenges of building interactive experiences in a Shopify theme.
“Building in Liquid, I spent a lot of time figuring out workarounds—through apps or Javascript—and I always had to worry about making the site slower. Using React and Next.js and building true components, it has been a lot easier.”
As a React-based headless solution built on modern frameworks, Pack makes building integrated site experiences a breeze, especially when you can tap into development resources like Pack’s fully-loaded starter kit.
“I was already familiar with the frameworks— Next.js and Tailwind—and Pack’s pre-built starter storefront came with a lot of the core functionality that you need in ecommerce, like quick add-to-cart buttons or the add-to-cart bar. That stood out vs. starter kits from Builder.io, which were a lot more basic. With Pack, I knew I could hit the ground running.”
Overall, Alejandro loves that his workflow is still very similar to what it was on a theme. In fact, in some ways, it’s easier because React requires far fewer workarounds than Liquid when it comes to building new onsite features – speeding up development timelines.
Benefit #3: Fewer apps, more control
Before partnering with Pack, the brand used Bold Commerce for search and filtering, plus Rebuy for product recommendations. Alejandro was able to replace both apps — using Fuse.js for search and filtering and Pack’s product grouping feature to build his own solution for product recommendations. In addition to saving the brand money in the long run, Alejandro has more control over how these experiences appear on the site:
“Installing apps on a theme is quick, but you don’t have the full control that you get by doing the whole development. I fetch data from the API, then I can fully control how I want those integrations to appear.”
Results
With its new Pack-powered storefront, the brand achieved a 45% increase in sales
Investing in a Pack-powered storefront to gain an edge over the competition has paid off substantially. Since launching its new custom storefront, the brand has streamlined frontend customization while driving significant conversions from new and returning shoppers.
Here's a snapshot of the results the brand has seen since its site launched:
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45% increase in total sales
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18% increase in CVR
Moving forward, Alejandro says he hopes to lean into more content-heavy site experiences — especially since he’s confident site speeds will remain intact. With Pack at their side, he can continue to deliver shopping experiences that captivate and convert.
"Pack is simply a superior experience if you’re looking for performance and control over your front end, and you don’t have a fully-staffed tech team. With Pack, you can spin up a custom storefront quickly, and end up with something that’s scalable, performant, and easy for anyone to manage.”