Founded in 1933, SANJO is an iconic Portuguese footwear brand, known for its classic sneakers and 100% local production. After being acquired in 2019 by a business group from Braga, the brand was revitalised by a young, dynamic team determined to bring SANJO back home and reaffirm its legacy.
Working with a factory in Felgueiras, SANJO combined tradition, style, and durability, modernising its designs with environmental innovations while preserving the essence of the materials that made it unique.
To grow and expand internationally, SANJO chose to migrate to Shopify, seeking agility, integration, and a personalized shopping experience. This digital transformation has been vital for repositioning the brand and driving its evolution in an increasingly demanding global market.
Since migrating to Shopify, SANJO has recorded:
- A 60% increase in retention rates, thanks to audience segmentation and marketing automation
- A 25% increase in conversion via Google Pay and Apple Pay using Shopify Payments
- A 50% reduction in logistics time through ERP integration
The Challenge: Disconnected systems hinder growth
Before migrating to Shopify, SANJO faced a challenging environment with its previous platform, characterized by fragmented systems and a lack of integration between online and offline operations.
Store management was complex and unintuitive, making it difficult to implement new features and integrate with external systems like the ERP. Technical support was insufficient, and the personalisation of the shopping experience—critical for international growth—was slow and reliant on manual processes.
The lack of data unification prevented the team from having a clear view of inventory and sales history across various locations. As a result, they heavily depended on external programmers, which delayed responses to customer needs and increased operational costs.
The old platform was a major challenge. We wanted to expand internationally and needed an intuitive solution. Managing the store was complex, adding new features was a nightmare, and technical support was lacking
This fragmented environment compromised customer experience consistency and made it difficult to make strategic, data-driven decisions.
The Solution: Seamless migration to agility
To overcome these challenges, SANJO migrated to Shopify—a process that took about five months—with support from partner Skrey. The first step was to define a clear structure by identifying which data and processes needed to be replicated and improved—from the product catalog and customer database to the order history—in order to maintain a centralised record for future analysis.
This groundwork paved the way for a smooth migration, which involved transferring data and customising a new store design optimised especially for mobile devices, serving a wide customer base who prefer to shop on mobile.
During the migration, several key solutions were implemented to streamline operations. For example, Shopify Markets enabled efficient management of prices, currencies, taxes, and localised content. This eliminated the need for multiple stores while allowing SANJO to tailor the shopping experience by country and language.
We realised that when we communicate in the customer's language, our conversion rate increases significantly—especially when we aren't internationally known. Plus, our story is beautiful, and letting customers understand it in their own language makes everything much simpler
In addition, Shopify Flow automated internal processes and improved team communication, fostering a more autonomous and efficient operation. Integrating the ERP enabled automatic updates of stock levels and synchronised inventory management between the online store and physical locations, reducing errors and cutting logistics time by at least 50%.
Building on this efficiency, Shopify Payments further streamlined the payment process by reducing checkout abandonment and boosting conversion rates, resulting in roughly a 25% increase in credit card transactions via Google Pay and Apple Pay. "Shopify combines multiple payment methods into a single gateway, allowing us to have just one contract without negotiating with multiple operators. It saves us a tremendous amount of time," confirms the migration partner Helder Rocha (Skrey).
They also digitalised their B2B channel, streamlining the ordering and quoting process and kickstarting an initial 10% growth—with huge potential as the channel consolidates. "With Shopify's B2B solution, we created an exclusive catalog for customers, set differentiated pricing, and applied automatic discounts for our partners. Plus, ERP integration optimized order processing, making our B2B channel much more efficient," explains Sofia.
Through these integrated solutions, SANJO has modernized its operations, gained autonomy, reduced reliance on external support, and accelerated its international growth.
The Results: Game-changing modernisation ignites growth
With Shopify, SANJO transformed its digital operations, achieving tangible results across multiple areas.
Conversion rates improved, with a 25% increase in conversions that boosted online sales via credit card transactions. "When SANJO launches the new Fall-Winter collection, sales will skyrocket – we're confident of at least a 50% increase," adds Helder.
Operational efficiency was also enhanced, as logistics time was reduced by 50% thanks to ERP integration that optimised inventory management and minimised order processing errors.
Additionally, the brand enjoyed significant cost reductions, with annual TCO savings of around 60%, greatly easing maintenance and development expenses. Moreover, effective audience segmentation and marketing automation boosted retention rates by 60%, further reinforcing their overall operational performance.
On the international front, centralised market management enabled personalised shopping experiences by region, resulting in consistent international sales growth—especially in the German market. As the migration is still recent, trends indicate that the brand is set to further expand its global presence in the coming months.
I'm constantly recommending Shopify. For me, one of Shopify's greatest strengths is the TCO, but its ecosystem of partners and solutions – including the Shopify App Store – is unbeatable. It all comes down to TCO, the ecosystem, the top-tier security and performance that Shopify offers. It's unique. No one has anything like it