Bared Footwear streamlines its operations and customer experience after switching to Shopify POS

Bared Footwear is an Australia-based shoe brand that was founded by podiatrist Anna Baird. Founded in 2008, the certified B-Corp footwear brand's mission is to create fashionable shoes that are good for your feet and better for the environment.

The wide appeal of Bared Footwear’s products resulted in skyrocketing sales online—and with that newfound scale came operational challenges. In the years leading up to 2020, the brand faced successive issues with their custom-built ecommerce site during high-volume sales promotions and decided to replatform to Shopify Plus.

But as the brand continued to break sales records online, it became clear that having Shopify Plus for ecommerce, and Lightspeed for their point-of-sale (POS) system was holding them back from achieving their vision of unified commerce. Burdened with inventory syncing issues and clunky fulfillment workflows, the team switched to Shopify POS.

Since moving to Shopify POS in 2022, Bared Footwear has enjoyed:

Challenge

Bared Footwear was early to recognize the importance of ecommerce for business growth, and they launched a custom website in 2012. But as the brand grew in complexity and scale, their in-house development team had to spend considerable time and energy maintaining the website and backend integrations.

Things reached a breaking point in early 2020 when the brand’s payment provider shut down mid-sale. “There were something like a hundred people trying to check out in a second—the payment gateway crashed and we were left with thousands of transactions that were not linked to their orders,” explains Alexandra McNab, Bared Footwear’s Chief Operating Officer. To rectify the issue, the team spent countless hours connecting each customer’s payment to their order one-by-one, and calling them to apologize for order delays or cancellations.

It was a watershed moment—something needed to change. “After that event, we said 'never again,’ and we replatformed our website to Shopify Plus,” says Alexandra. “Once we replatformed, it was like night and day in terms of the performance and stability.”

The brand initially stuck with Lightspeed POS for in-store transactions, but as ecommerce continued to grow through 2021, it became more problematic to have retail and ecommerce sales on different platforms.

“Our online store was selling orders faster than the API could sync with Lightspeed, which also functioned as our inventory management system,” Alexandra explains. “Because of this, Lightspeed couldn’t present accurate inventory availability, which meant we risked overselling items if our stores wanted to continue transacting normally during an online sale.”

To solve this issue, the team would cut the connection between Lightspeed and their website before launching a promotion, which also meant closing their retail stores, or isolating store inventory. “We had no way of making sure that we didn't oversell without shutting down a sales channel or reducing the amount of stock available to the online customer, which was really frustrating operationally,” Alexandra explains. “It was also a really negative customer experience—we wanted to be able to welcome our customers to our stores during sales.”

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Solution

After experiencing the reliability of Shopify Plus, Bared chose to migrate all of their five brick-and-mortar stores to Shopify POS. “Because we’re so heavily focused on the omnichannel customer experience, having all our tooling and commerce data unified in a single platform was a real driving factor,” says Alexandra.

In addition to unifying their commerce stack on Shopify, the brand also implemented Oracle NetSuite as an ERP. “Two systems are better than three,” Alexandra explains. “With Shopify, the ecommerce and POS components of our tech stack are consolidated and sync with the channel-agnostic inventory data hosted in NetSuite. All our sales channels display the same stock availability, and we can run a promotion online and in-store concurrently without worrying about overselling.”

Since consolidating their commerce stack, the brand is no longer burdened with inventory discrepancies or maintaining multiple systems. “We’ve definitely saved time that would otherwise be spent maintaining and reconciling platforms. It's a lot easier when all commerce data is flowing through Shopify.”

The team has also enjoyed using new fulfillment workflows to better serve shoppers and close more sales. Ship-to-customer, for instance, turns Bared Footwear’s stores into an endless aisle. If one store doesn’t have a customer’s color or size in stock, staff can close the sale and ship the order to their home address from any store location with stock on-hand in one straightforward workflow.

Additionally, email carts give customers the freedom to contemplate and complete their purchase online with a pre-loaded cart sent directly to their email by store employees. “These fulfillment options wouldn’t be possible if our store inventory, orders, and checkout wasn’t linked to our online store checkout like it is with Shopify,” Alexandra explains. “It’s a much better experience for the customer and helps secure sales that may have otherwise been lost.”

Alongside improving the buying experience, store associates can now process returns or exchanges for online orders more quickly. “Having all operations centrally managed really streamlines our post-purchase service,” she explains. “We never have to play detective in multiple systems to locate a customer’s order. They know it’s in Shopify.”

Results

Since unifying their sales channels on Shopify, Bared Footwear has streamlined fulfillment capabilities. “Shopify allows our in-store service to be what we want it to be without forcing store teams to jump through hoops,” Alexandra explains. “Ship-to-customer makes it so straightforward for staff to fulfill those orders, which means they’re more likely to offer it as an option to customers. That fulfillment method is now responsible for 4% of store orders.”

With 90% of their workforce now using Shopify, Bared Footwear can onboard staff faster than before, freeing up valuable time to enhance the customer experience. “The ease of use of Shopify helps us focus training more on how we want staff to serve and educate customers on our products, rather than teaching them how to use our systems,” Alexandra explains. “The time it takes to onboard new staff has easily been cut down by an hour on the first day alone—it’s a very intuitive platform.”

Bared Footwear’s in-house development team has also enjoyed maintaining fewer systems. “When all sales are coming through Shopify, you don't have to maintain the integrations required when you use different systems to manage each channel,” Alexandra explains. “We can re-invest where it matters: delighting customers with impeccable products and service, and growing the business.”

Perhaps most importantly, the brand can now launch promotions confidently without shutting down their retail stores. “We can launch a sale online and at our stores without worrying about crashes, inventory issues, or overselling,” says Alexandra. “Retail stores account for more than 30% of total sales, representing millions in revenue annually, and we love welcoming our customers to them.”

With Shopify Plus and Shopify POS, Bared Footwear saw results fast.