Aviator Nation unified its channels and saw conversions take flight

Aviator Nation is a 1970’s inspired west coast apparel brand that sells hand-stitched clothing made in the USA. Since its humble beginnings in founder Paige Mycoskie’s Venice Beach, California garage in 2006, the brand has carved out a unique niche selling its colorful, vintage-style clothing through a variety of channels, including its ecommerce store, 18 physical retail locations, and popup booths at music festivals nationwide.

Although the brand originally built its website with Adobe Commerce and used Lightspeed POS to operate its retail stores, it migrated to Shopify to simplify omnichannel management and improve its customer experience.

“As we’ve continued to expand our partnership with Shopify, our growth trajectory has really taken off,” says Curtis Ulrich, Director of Ecommerce at Aviator Nation.

With Shopify Plus and Shopify POS, Aviator Nation has seen great results:

Challenge

With a consistent rotation of fresh product releases, exciting promotional campaigns, and other updates to share, the team at Aviator Nation needed to modify its website frequently. But due to Adobe Commerce complexity, it had to rely on external assistance to make relatively simple changes.

“We had to email our web developer with the changes we needed to make,” Curtis says. “The process could take days. I knew there had to be a better way.”

Meanwhile, the brand lacked a unified system for managing inventory and transactions online and offline across its 18 store locations, which led to customer service headaches and missed sales opportunities. Since its ecommerce store wasn’t synced with its retail locations, the brand was unable to let customers return in-store purchases online. They were also unable to pull from retail store inventories to continue selling items that were sold out online. With new releases selling out quickly on Aviator Nation’s website due to its passionate global fanbase, this was a growing concern.

Finally, as popup booths at music festivals continued to help the brand connect with new customers aligned with its values, the team recognized it needed a better way to build authentic, long-term relationships with these customers. But it had a hard time doing so since it didn’t have the tools to centrally manage its customer data across every channel.

Aviator Nation needed to find a way to streamline its operations and fully unify its business.

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Solution

In 2016, Aviator Nation replatformed from Adobe Commerce to Shopify, which immediately enabled the team to customize its website without external web development assistance. The move also helped the brand shift its focus to new strategies for customer growth and retention by exploring the integrations available via the Shopify app ecosystem.

Checkout UI extensions, which the brand used to improve its checkout experience, were among its most effective integrations. Using apps including Checkout Blocks, the brand customized the content on its checkout page. It also found new ways to boost conversions and drive revenue, integrating social proof with reviews via Yotpo and upsells via Rebuy. The team A/B tested different checkout strategies and seamlessly applied the variations leading to the best results.

The team also used mobile app builder Tapcart to build a custom app synced with its Shopify store’s backend, giving customers another easy way to buy online and stay connected with the brand.

As its online sales volume grew, Aviator Nation continued opening new retail stores and doing popup sales events. Its business needs were evolving quickly, and the team began looking for ways to increase its margins and continue improving its customer experience. It upgraded to Shopify Plus to take advantage of lower processing fees and to bring all of its sales channels together with a more robust set of features built for omnichannel commerce.

Soon after the upgrade, the brand migrated from Lightspeed to Shopify POS for all of its 18 retail stores and its popup booths as well. This allowed Aviator Nation to finally unify its customer data across all of its sales channels and provide the levels of customer service it had been striving for.

“For years, there was a disconnect between our online business and our retail business,” says Curtis. “Unifying our in-store and online sales with Shopify streamlined our operations and made it so much easier to gather the data we needed to provide our customers with exceptional experiences.”

Results

Migrating to Shopify has enabled Aviator Nation’s small team to stay nimble as the business has grown from a small garage to the global fashion arena. It now has the tools it needs to continue accelerating the pace of its expansion across all channels and adapt to the changing needs of its customers.

For example, when online sales surged as people shopped more from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, the team was able to seamlessly adjust to the higher order volumes.

At a recent music festival where the team set up a booth, it processed a staggering volume of over 2,500 orders in just three days, all via iPads and Shopify POS card readers. Even more importantly, with its customer data now centrally managed through Shopify, Aviator Nation can build lasting connections and grow the lifetime value of these customers.

With Shopify Plus, Aviator Nation has united its point-of-sale and ecommerce systems. Sales have continued to grow, even with reduced ad spending as the team has leaned into more customer retention and upsell opportunities.

Processing in-store returns online is no longer a problem, and the team can offer new benefits to delight customers, such as providing same day shipping for items ordered online when the item is in-stock at a retail store. The team has found such capabilities have triggered more sales, and it now reports shipping over 2,000 orders per month from its retail store inventory to online customers.

With Shopify Plus, Aviator Nation saw results fast: