Mike Riess founded web design agency Riess Group in 2006, and launched the first ecommerce store on Shopify the following year. In the 17 years since, Riess Group has helped clients from Joanna Gaines to the American Heart Association to transition from their legacy systems to Shopify. “We know that Shopify is a great platform. We use Shopify because we know that clients are going to be happy on Shopify,” Mike explains.
When Shopify POS launched in 2013, Riess Group took the opportunity to help clients focus not just on selling online, but also on honing an integrated omnichannel strategy for their business—and with a personal touch to boot. “We’re very much a white-glove agency, “ says Mike. “It’s better for the customer if we’re consultative and take as much time as they need to answer all their questions. We’re not about closing the sale so much as we are about getting clients the right help.”
Riess Group now helps retail companies of all sizes use Shopify POS. Brands like women’s fashion retailer Vestique have leveraged Riess Group to migrate their in-store and online systems to Shopify with great success.
Since moving to Shopify POS with the help of Riess Group, Vestique has seen:
- 18% growth in sales YOY
- 3 new brick-and-mortar locations opened in one year
- Significant decrease in employee training time
Challenge
After years of working with apparel brands, Riess Group has found that apparel retailers tend to experience the same struggles across the board, especially in today’s omnichannel environment. “Inventory and returns are the lovely challenges of apparel retail,” says Mike. “Having the right styles and sizes in stock at the right locations is really challenging.”
This was one of the major issues Vestique was trying to overcome when it began working with Riess Group. Co-owners Morgan Lashley and Caroline Dunham launched Vestique in 2010 as an online boutique selling trendy clothing and accessories at a fraction of the cost of most high-fashion brands. “We look to the runway for inspiration, but we want to offer the best customer service and quality pieces at affordable prices” Morgan explains.
And customers do really love Vestique’s products: While it began as an ecommerce business, the brand has since opened 12 store locations. “We started opening brick-and-mortar stores because customers still like to touch and try-on items that they may not feel as comfortable buying online,” Morgan adds.
When Vestique approached Riess Group for help, the company was using two separate systems for online and in-store retailing and struggling to unify them. “Both our past systems were pretty archaic,” Caroline says. “We were never able to streamline and have them talk to each other.” Not only did this cause inventory inaccuracies and lost sales, but Riess also explains that the lack of integration between the platforms meant that Vestique missed out on many omnichannel functionalities that would help level-up the business.
A lot of retailers are frustrated because they're trying to integrate their legacy POS systems into other platforms like their social media and they weren't built to work that way. On Shopify, most of these systems have an integration out-of-box.
Solution
Vestique decided that it was time for a change. With Riess Group’s help, the brand migrated both its ecommerce and POS platforms to Shopify in 2019. “We assisted with training them on both systems, helping them get their Shopify POS configured, and sharing best practices on how to work with Shopify,” says Mike. “We also did some custom functionality around inventory availability.”
One of the native Shopify POS functionalities that Riess Group helped with was enabling Vestique to use its physical store locations as fulfillment centers for online orders with the click of a button, so it could always clinch the sale no matter where the customer was shopping. This was especially crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic when the brand had to shutter its physical stores, allowing employees to utilize that stock to keep profits high online.
Riess Group also helped Vestique implement Shopify POS’ out-of-box functionalities like store-to-store shipping and buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS), which has helped with upselling and increasing in-store purchases. Vestique also found that training employees on the Shopify system was easier than ever, meaning new hires could hit the ground running on day one.
And the user-friendly reporting capabilities of Shopify POS has been a game-changer for Vestique’s bottom line. “We never had great reporting before. We learned that to be a good business owner, you have to be a historian,” says Morgan. “That’s helped us scale and grow.”
It's a lot of logistics. Making their business run really easily, maximizing the inventory ability, and consulting around best practices for Shopify's offerings.
Results
After migrating to Shopify POS in 2019, Vestique saw an 18% percent overall increase in sales in 2020 and a 13% percent increase the following year. The company was also able to open three new store locations in 2023. Five years after adopting Shopify POS, Vestique is still going strong and continues to work with Riess Group to grow its brand, including an ecommerce revamp in the works for 2024. “I can’t vocalize how great Shopify has been for our business,” Caroline says.
Mike explains that Vestique’s story is a common one for Riess Group’s apparel industry clients, who are not always aware of all the capabilities of Shopify POS and are blown away by the results. “A lot of retailers are very aware of Shopify’s reputation as the best ecommerce platform, but they don’t know as much about POS,” Mike says. “We help them close that gap.”
We switched to Shopify in 2019, and 2020 and 2021 were the best years for our business so far.