Girls with Gems is an Australian high-end women’s fashion boutique that started out with their founders, mother and daughter duo Lefka and Lia Georgantis, selling jewellery from their home. Since then, Girls with Gems has grown rapidly, with a thriving one-stop destination boutique in Sydney’s Double Bay and a bustling online business that is making inroads internationally.
When Girls with Gems’ online business started to grow rapidly, a lack of efficiency in back-end processes proved to be a limiting factor in how quickly the business was able to scale and expand. With Shopify’s Plus plan and the collection of powerful tools that came with it, Girls with Gems was able to scale their operations more efficiently, driving growth while keeping a tight control on resources, leading to a period of unfettered expansion for the company.
After upgrading to Shopify’s Plus plan, Girls with Gems has seen:
- 95% YoY growth in revenue
- 107% YoY surge in online sales revenue
- 42% YoY increase in conversion rate
The challenge: Manual processes made growth challenging
The online sales channel has always been part of Girls with Gems’ retail strategy, even if most of their revenue was driven by in-store sales when they first started out. Over time, however, online sales have become a more substantial part of the business, with the retailer adopting Shopify in 2016 to help them scale as their online store traffic grew.
As Girls with Gems’ business has expanded, the work involved in handling sales online and managing inventory across both online and in-store has grown. For Girls with Gems to scale successfully and support this growth sustainably, they needed to find more efficient ways to tackle tasks like customer engagement at scale, launching new products or flash sales, and keeping track of stock across multiple channels.
For example, when Girls with Gems previously wanted to launch seasonal or flash sales, a lot of staff resources were needed at the time of the sale itself to promote the event to customers, amend prices, and customize the website to highlight certain products. Many of these tasks could not be implemented in advance of the sale itself due to a lack of automation, meaning team members were left to tackle a lot of work in a short amount of time.
Girls with Gems needed to handle high levels of revenue efficiently and manage increasing volumes of inventory effectively as sales went up. As a result, the retailer decided to upgrade to a platform that could give them the support to scale seamlessly as they grew their business in Australia and eyed inroads to foreign markets and international expansion.
The solution: Launching a unified platform for greater scale
Already on Shopify, Girls with Gems upgraded to Shopify’s Plus tier when sales and revenue started to really take off and the business had the opportunity to expand rapidly. Shopify Plus gave Girls with Gems access to additional features and solutions that helped to simplify tasks and enable them to scale and grow effectively.
For Girls with Gems, a big part of supporting that growth was finding new ways to ramp up back-end efficiency to power scale. For instance, the retailer has used Shopify’s scheduling tool, Launchpad, to make the process involved in launching sales events more efficient.
With Launchpad, available on the Shopify Plus plan, Girls with Gems comfortably executed their 5 Days of Christmas sale in December 2024 without a hitch. This involved preparing sale-specific pricing and product details well in advance of the sale period and scheduling the changes to take effect on each respective sale day for a completely different look and feel to the online store—an ambitious approach that may not have been attempted without Launchpad to make such scheduling possible.
With the scheduling capabilities in Launchpad on Shopify’s Plus plan, we got our time back on the day of each sale. Now, we have more confidence in what we are doing when we decide to promote and launch a special sale. Rather than trying to do everything last minute, we can now prepare everything beforehand, in great detail, and schedule the required website changes to launch on the day.
Plus, Girls with Gems is using Shopify Flow to automate and bring greater efficiency to a range of back-end processes, many of them aimed at providing a more personalised experience for shoppers. Meanwhile, the company is driving scale with other tools available in the Shopify App Store, such as Tapcart, which is being used to power mobile app-based shopping for the brand.
At the same time, Girls with Gems makes use of Shopify POS to power sales at their retail storefront in Sydney. The ability to accept payments using Tap to Pay on the shop floor via the Shopify POS app on sales assistants’ mobile devices has streamlined the in-store sales process while also making the tracking of sales and inventory across channels easier, with the retailer using the Shopify platform for their inventory management processes.
The results: A partner for efficient growth and scale
With Shopify’s Plus plan supporting their scale, Girls with Gems has seen their revenue grow by up to 91%, year-over-year (YoY), while online sales have more than doubled annually. Thanks to the efficiency that the tools available on the Shopify Plus plan have offered Girls with Gems, the company has also seen substantial growth in revenue per full-time staff member.
With the Shopify Flow tool, Girls with Gems has been able to bring extensive automation to many of their back-end processes, delivering greater efficiency and freeing up employees to spend more time on more valuable activities, such as customer engagement. Such automation capability has given Girls with Gems the power to scale and evolve quickly.
Using Flow on the Shopify Plus plan, Girls with Gems has created wider business efficiency through automation, allowing us to move faster and reallocate resources to other important areas. We've implemented nearly 30 flows to run at the same time, enabling capabilities such as same-day delivery and gift card management. If we managed all these processes manually, it would take us much longer. Now it's fully automated.
Girls with Gems is also exploring new ways to use Shopify’s AI-powered assistant, Sidekick, to bring even more efficiency to their business, helping team members streamline processes such as financial reporting, inventory stocktakes, and working out free shipping thresholds for online orders.
There is no way we would exist at our current size without Shopify. The scale the platform offers us is beyond valuable. The speed at which they are releasing new and improved features is elite. They are the market leader for a reason and I wouldn't bother looking anywhere else if starting out again.
