Oz Hair and Beauty got their start in 2012 when CEO Anthony Nappa saw a business opportunity to support the legacy of his parents’ highly successful salon business, Oz Hair, by offering an online shopping experience featuring premium quality hair and beauty products.
With a dedicated salon clientele and online shopping becoming more popular, the Sydney-based brand made their ecommerce debut on eBay, but quickly established their own online store to provide a more personalized and engaging experience for customers.
However, with a custom-built online store that required extensive developer resources to update, customize, and optimize, Oz Hair and Beauty turned to Shopify for its ease of use and functionality. This helped to accelerate Oz Hair and Beauty’s expansion plans and drive the growth of their retail presence.
Since moving to Shopify, Oz Hair and Beauty has seen:
- 484% year-over-year revenue growth since adopting Shopify in 2017
- Increase in retail sales from 5% to 20% of total sales
- 7 retail stores launched in 18 months
The challenge: Developer costs constrain growth
Oz Hair and Beauty launched their own online store for a more brand-centric presence after first selling products on eBay. However, the company’s custom-built ecommerce platform required extensive developer resources for even small changes, such as design and checkout optimization.
Not only were developers needed for minor alterations, it was time consuming and labor intensive to accomplish simple things like uploading new products or updating existing ones. For a brand with thousands of products in their repertoire, this slowed down Oz Hair and Beauty’s ability to adjust their product range to suit consumer needs.
With a focus on growth, Oz Hair and Beauty wanted to expand their business to other markets and open up physical storefront locations. But the website customizations and point of sale (POS) integrations that would make these goals possible were expensive and slow to implement, restricting Oz Hair and Beauty’s ability to grow quickly.
The solution: A commerce platform that anyone can use
Oz Hair and Beauty migrated to Shopify in early 2017. With the user-friendly interface, the brand immediately gained the ability to make changes to their website without the need for additional developer resources. And with easy product uploads and updates, the brand grew their online product range to more than 15,000 items.
Once we went to Shopify, we were able to operate at another level and move so much faster. We didn’t need the developers to make changes, we could upload products faster, and make changes faster on the website. Shopify just made it so easy for our business to grow.
Oz Hair and Beauty also implemented Shopify POS to help drive their retail store strategy. The ability to deploy Shopify POS in a new store with the click of a button has seen the brand open 7 stores in the space of 18 months, with more to follow. Because Shopify POS is underpinned by the Shopify Plus platform, Oz Hair and Beauty was able to offer their customers a truly omnichannel customer-centric experience and services such as click and collect and endless aisle for ship-to-home capability.
Shopify POS has empowered us to transform our business from an ecommerce seller to an omnichannel retailer practically overnight, with the flick of a switch. Because we no longer need extensive developer input and third party POS integrations, we quickly grew the retail side of our business and launched seven stores easily.
Using Shopify's international sales tools, Oz Hair and Beauty was able to localize their online store to appeal to customers in regions beyond Australia, with the brand launching a presence in New Zealand. The cross-border management tool made local customizations such as payment currency easy to achieve without additional developer resources. Further, Shopify’s unified back end gave the brand access to their international data from the same dashboard they used for their main store.
The result: Easy updates and integration drive sales
Since implementing Shopify, Oz Hair and Beauty has grown their revenue by 484% year-over-year. Oz Hair and Beauty is also able to operate faster and make decisions with greater precision than ever before thanks to Shopify, which empowers them to easily update their website without extensive developer input and easily gain access to customer data across all sales channels online, in-store, and overseas.
With Shopify POS driving their retail strategy, Oz Hair and Beauty have grown their in-store sales from around 5% to 20% of overall sales in the space of a year. As the brand opens up more stores, they expect that this will further increase to 50% of total sales or more. Both new and existing stores will be kitted out with the newly launched POS Go devices, letting Oz Hair and Beauty sell on the shop floor for a smoother shopper experience.
With Shopify, we could access reporting and insights with the click of a button, enabling us to make swift and precise decisions for our business.
