The Somewhere Co. is an Australian brand that crafts bold and colorful wares for home, work, baby, and play. From cooler bags and woven rugs for picnic outings to weekend bags, umbrellas, and change mats, The Somewhere Co. is the one-stop shop for all your essentials to take you somewhere.
With a direct-to-consumer (DTC) site, three retail locations, and an expansive wholesale network, The Somewhere Co.’s product range can be found in virtually every corner of Australia. When the team wanted to bring the same style and functionality to its B2B site as its DTC site, it turned to B2B on Shopify, a suite of first-party features integrated right into the Shopify Admin.
With B2B on Shopify, The Somewhere Co. has seen:
- 33% reduction in average B2B order time
- 91% reduction in time to update and edit B2B product listings
- 13% year-over-year (YoY) increase in average B2B order value during September 2023
The Challenge
Ever since The Somewhere Co. was founded in 2021, wholesale has been a key component of its success. Today, the brand's wholesale customer network encompasses retailers ranging from large national department stores to independent boutiques.
But although the brand’s DTC site offered customers an experience that reflected its values of style and quality, its B2B site lacked the same look and feel. And with a new collection launch on the horizon, where The Somewhere Co. would be increasing its SKU count by 50%, the brand knew it needed a new wholesale platform that would save time for customers and employees alike.
“Our wholesale portal looked really dated,” explains Letitia Devin, Wholesale Admin & Marketing Support at The Somewhere Co. “The user interface didn’t look very pretty and wasn’t very easy for stock management. It was difficult for us to create collections for wholesalers to see what was in stock. It wasn’t very user friendly.”
The Solution
With its wholesale customers busy running their own stores, The Somewhere Co. wanted to create a quick and seamless B2B buying experience that mimicked its DTC experience.
The brand had already upgraded its DTC operations platform from Shopify to Shopify Plus in 2021, but its B2B business was still running on a Cin7 front-end and back-end. Knowing that Shopify integrated with Cin7, The Somewhere Co. began preparing its wholesale migration to Shopify Plus in March 2023. Tapping into the B2B on Shopify suite of features – only available to stores on Shopify Plus – the brand launched its new wholesale site just two months later, in May 2023.
To improve the experience for retail stockists, The Somewhere Co. added Shopify’s Quick Add functionality to its site. With this feature, stockists can swiftly add the core products they buy regularly to their carts. For new or unfamiliar products, simply hovering over the product image provides a view of the product descriptions and the wholesale prices and recommended retail price (RRP) together without having to click through to the product page. Customers can then easily adjust quantities at checkout as needed.
The team also integrated apps like Klaviyo, so that when a new customer was set up, they were automatically added to the Klaviyo mailing list. Similarly, if a customer was removed from the system, the change automatically flowed through to Klaviyo, without any action needed by The Somewhere Co.’s wholesale team.
Results
With B2B on Shopify, The Somewhere Co. has created a wholesale platform that has the same look, feel, and ease of navigation as its DTC site. With a more streamlined front-end, wholesale customers have a clearer view of the full product range and can quickly add stock to their baskets. As a result, the site is easier to navigate: stockists are more engaged, abandoned carts are at a minimum, and The Somewhere Co. has seen a substantial increase in average value order.
The shift to B2B on Shopify has streamlined processes for The Somewhere Co.’s wholesale team too. Utilizing the Shopify bulk editing feature, for example, has drastically cut down the time it takes the team to carry out mundane administrative tasks, like launching new styles on the site.
During the 2023 Spring/Summer collection launch, when The Somewhere Co. increased its product catalog by 50%, it took the team just five minutes to get the 220+ new SKUs live and selling. If not for B2B on Shopify, the team would have had to go into each individual product listing to publish new products, which would have taken over an hour.
Freed up from time-consuming tasks like new product releases and updating mailing lists, The Somewhere Co.’s wholesale team can now focus on revenue-generating activities like direct sales and curating EDMs tailored to individual products, all through the capabilities enabled by B2B on Shopify.
Customers are so busy running their own stores that they need their own buying experience to be as simple and easy as possible. With B2B on Shopify, we’re able to make the categories really clear and provide an experience akin to what our customers are used to when they’re online shopping.
