Ariel Kaye, a design enthusiast and keen consumer of homewares, always believed that making a house feel like a home should be easier. Noticing that few brands successfully threaded the needle between high quality and affordability—or offered particularly intuitive shopping experiences—she launched Parachute in 2014.
"I wanted to create a brand that not only offered beautiful products but also made the shopping experience feel like entering a welcoming and inviting home," says Ariel.
This vision guided Parachute as it grew from a direct-to-consumer model to a multichannel retail operation. But a custom platform got in the way of their ability to scale and to shift focus and expand offerings and capabilities as the market demanded.
That all changed when Parachute switched to Shopify, where they’ve been able to:
- Increase order size: Retail AOV has grown by 12% in the past 5 years
- Reduce operational costs: By decreasing their engineering team from 15 to 1, they saved over $1 million in operational expenses.
- Increase BOPIS revenue by 5x in 4 years: BOPIS has shown consistent growth as a percentage of Parachute’s overall omnichannel business strategy.
A custom platform roadblocks the growth it was meant to empower
At the core of Parachute’s founding vision is the conviction that high-end experiences with homeware should be more widely available. As such, the team was at first enamored with the idea of running a custom platform to support its operations. However, they quickly realized that this decision came with major drawbacks,including limited scalability and high maintenance costs. This meant they spent a significant portion of time and budget on keeping the store up and running, rather than creating the bespoke look and personalized experience that drew them to a custom platform in the first place.
Recognizing the need for a more flexible solution, they made the pivotal shift to a headless Shopify store, with the goal of focusing less on being a tech company and more on building relationships and telling strong brand stories.
Says Ariel Kaye, founder of Parachute: "Our focus shifted to being a brand that genuinely connects with our customers. We prioritized building relationships and sharing our story, highlighting what sets us apart in the market. By focusing on our unique competitive differentiators, we created a narrative that resonates with our audience and fosters loyalty."
Still, as eager craftspeople and hearty DIYers, even turning to a headless Shopify store didn’t stop Parachute from experimenting on their own. As they experienced rapid growth, quickly emerging as a prominent name in bedding and expanding to adjacent items such as furniture, they continued to take pride in solving their own technical problem by building bespoke solutions outside of Shopify. However, as intrepid as these efforts were, they led to more complexity, and distracted from the main mission. And when the technical team did find the time and space to tackle the larger, more innovative projects, the investment it took to fully stand them up didn’t compare to the plug-and-play functionality they knew would be available on a platform like Shopify.
As Shopify added greater capabilities, the Parachute team decided it was time to lean into their headless Shopify platform more than ever before, to see just how bespoke they could become with built-in features and ecosystem apps.
[Over time], our technology team’s ability to provide an advantage became a disadvantage. We even went so far as to build our own checkout. We just realized it wasn’t worth it; it brought too much risk.
As the team leaned further into their Shopify platform, there were a few core challenges they sought to solve, and specific solutions they were looking for to address them.
Challenge 1: Fragmented sales channels
Parachute’s success began online, but soon they had expanded to physical stores. In doing so, their sales channels fragmented, leading to significant operational challenges. The introduction of multiple POS systems led to confusion among staff and customers alike. When customers purchased inventory in-store, they had to use one POS system; if they sought items unavailable in the store, they had to switch to another POS, resulting in a clunky shopping experience.
"It was chaotic. We had different systems for different scenarios, and it made things complicated for both our team and our customers," recalls Ariel.
Solution 1: Unifying POS systems
To address the challenges of omnichannel selling, Parachute transitioned to Shopify POS, which allowed them to streamline operations and create a unified shopping experience. The new POS system enabled them to create custom promotions and facilitate seamless transactions. When preparing for special events, Parachute’s team can now utilize the POS interface to create custom tiles for discount codes and promotions, add links to their partners’ sites, and make the most of POS Go, a handheld, all-in-one POS device ideal for on-the-floor selling during busy events.
Results: Enhanced shopping experience and BOPIS implementation
- BOPIS functionality: Customers can buy online and pick up in-store, enhancing convenience.
- Ship from store: Customers shopping during an event or in-store can take their time trying out bedding, then get their big bulky items shipped directly to their homes, so they don’t have to lug them around with them as they continue shopping.
- Improved inventory management: A single platform for inventory tracking simplifies and streamlines operations for staff.
- Seamless transactions: A unified checkout process enhances the overall shopping experience, while ensuring that customer data is captured and profiles are created for personalization and retargeting down the line.
Parachute has seen an annual average of 3,500 BOPIS orders, with 1,300 of those coming in the fourth quarter of 2024 alone, accounting for 35% of their total BOPIS orders.
In the past four years, the portion of their revenue derived from BOPIS has increased 500%, with consistent growth each year. BOPIS hit an all-time high for the company in the fourth quarter of 2024, which brought in 48% of Parachute’s annual BOPIS revenue.
With Shopify POS, we now have a single point of truth for our inventory, which makes everything flow much more smoothly.
Adopting Shopify POS also resulted in much less training time required for Parachute’s retail staff, who immediately felt comfortable using it. It also made them more independent by allowing them to create their own accounts.
Shopify is super simple to pick up and easy to learn. And it is nice for a regular part-time associate to be pretty self-sufficient in setting up their POS account.
Challenge 2: Building more meaningful customer connections
With a growing customer base, Parachute sought to deepen relationships through personalized shopping experiences. In-store, they already had what they needed: friendly, caring, and deeply knowledgeable associates, on a mission to help match customers to the best bedding for their unique lifestyles and needs. But they knew that the customer relationship doesn’t stop there. They wanted a way to connect with their customers beyond the store, and also beyond the basic post-purchase email blast. They sought a way to provide customer service, retarget, and retain through continued meaningful connection—and they knew that meant finding a better way to capture customer data.
Solution 2: Leveraging a key integration with HubSpot for personalization
Parachute turned to the Shopify app ecosystem to connect their HubSpot account to their store. By doing so, they were able to create customer profiles through Shopify POS, then use these detailed profiles to inform their marketing and communication strategies. In-store associates follow up after the sale to see how the item is working for the customer and offer support—all while mentioning topics of conversation from the in-store interaction. This creates prime opportunities for cross- and upsells and fosters a deeper, more robust relationship and customer loyalty. It’s a relationship that continues when the customer returns to the store. Even if their original associate is not there, all the next associate needs to do is pull up the customer’s profile and pick up where the last associate left off.
“That personal connection is really what we are and what we want our teams to focus on; we see a big impact from that,” says Juliette.
Results: Improved customer engagement and loyalty
- Tailored communications: Personalized outreach resonates with customers and keeps them coming back.
- Stronger customer relationships: Enhanced loyalty creates brand ambassadors.
- Data-driven insights: Better systems for capturing and analyzing data helps Parachute understand customer preferences and behaviors.
"The data we have access to by having everything in a unified place through Shopify has allowed us to truly understand our customers and tailor our communications to meet their needs," says Ariel. "This level of personalization is what sets us apart in a crowded market."
With access to this data comes opportunities for new engagement methods. For instance, Parachute’s data (and in-person conversations) indicated to the team that their customers love their pups—and, it could be assumed, those very same pups often shared their sheets. To honor these sleeping arrangements, the team put on a dog bed party and offered free beauty shots for all pups. Events like this are a unique and engaging way to partner with other brands, have a local presence, and connect with customers.
Challenge 3: Managing excess inventory
As demand grew, Parachute struggled to effectively manage excess inventory while maximizing sales opportunities. The team sought a solution that would help them better leverage their retail spaces as fulfillment centers, rather than letting stock sit as excess inventory in their warehouses. More stock in-store also opens up the variety for the customers who shop there directly to create their own customized bundles. But managing inventory in this manner requires tight analytic connections between sister stores and warehouses, capabilities that Parachute didn’t have in place.
Solution 3: Embracing omnichannel strategies
Shopify POS helped Parachute fully adopt an omnichannel fulfillment strategy so they can manage inventory more effectively and enhance customer engagement. They can now sell anytime, anywhere, with precision, so that customers get their products when promised and are happy with the process.
Results: Streamlined operations and better customer experiences help increase sales
- Efficient inventory management: The ability to ship from stores allows the team to better meet customer expectations without the risk of being stuck with excess inventory.
- Increased sales: An average of 72 ship-from-store (SFS) orders per day contribute to over 26,000 SFS orders annually across 17 stores.
- Enhanced customer convenience: Customers benefit from a seamless shopping experience across channels.
"By utilizing our stores as fulfillment centers, we can respond to customer demand more effectively and minimize excess inventory," explains Juliette Grant, retail operations manager. "It's a win-win for us and our customers."
Reductions in cost and operational efficiencies pave the way for future growth
By fully integrating with Shopify, Parachute simplified their operations, reducing reliance on a large technical team and eliminating unnecessary complexities.
Moving from a headless setup to a full Shopify theme will save Parachute over $1 million a year in operational expenses, including headcount and software. Staff are now empowered to implement changes quickly without technical barriers.
"By moving to Shopify, we were able to unlock a wealth of opportunities that we didn't have before,” says Ariel. “Our team, many of whom were not technically trained, could now take charge of the platform and implement changes quickly. This shift empowered everyone to contribute to the growth of the business, allowing for faster iterations and more innovative solutions."
And now the team and company as a whole are freed up to focus on what they do best: creating innovative, quality products and building deep customer relationships.
Parachute has also benefited from unifying their tech stack, reducing the number of apps and products needed to manage their operations. Where previously they relied on a custom-built platform to handle everything related to products, discounts, shipping, and sales, as well as a CMS, now it’s all unified through Shopify.
Being able to unify our tech stack and lower its footprint has changed what we can do as a company… This creates more focus for us and allows us to spend our resources building differentiating features instead of basic functionality, while reducing risk.
A bright future with Shopify
As Parachute looks to the future, they are preparing to enhance their Shopify experience further.
"Through Shopify, we’re able to give customers updates and provide the best experience because we have a single source of truth,” says Ariel.
This focus on customer experience enables Parachute to keep customers informed about their orders, enhancing personalization in marketing moving forward, and delivering on their core mission of helping customers transform their houses into homes.
"It truly is the full package,” says Ariel. “We're excited about the future and the possibilities that lie ahead. With Shopify by our side, we can continue to innovate and provide our customers with the best possible experience."
