New Zealand-born footwear brand Allbirds launched on Shopify in 2016 with their iconic Wool Runner, quickly earning recognition from TIME Magazine as “the world's most comfortable shoe.” As the brand expanded from digital-native roots to physical retail, they added Shopify POS to maintain a unified home for all their customer information on the platform and a seamless experience across all sales channels.
As they continued to scale, managing inventory throughout their retail network proved challenging—stores needed deep inventory purchases, while online sales were limited to warehouse stock only, creating inefficiencies and missed sales opportunities. This led Allbirds to implement the ship from store feature of Shopify POS, quickly transforming how they managed inventory and fulfilled orders across all channels.
With Ship from Store on Shopify POS, Allbirds has:
- Enabled global/national network of 31 retail stores to fulfill omnichannel product demand
- Increased their product assortment and quantity of best-selling items in store
- Reduced shipping and labor costs associated with end-of-season warehouse returns
- Boosted website conversion rates due to increased inventory availability
The Challenge: Maximizing inventory efficiency across channels
Allbirds was grappling with several costly inventory management challenges prior to implementing Ship from Store. For one, stores maintained full size runs for every shoe, which required deeper than ideal inventory levels for shoes that didn’t sell well at particular locations. This reduced the brand’s ability to turn inventory in many stores and limited how broad their retail assortment could be during any given season.
“At the end of each season, we would regularly pack up any slow moving or out of season merchandise and ship it back to our warehouse, which was an inefficient use of time and money,” says Micah Nelson, Director of Product Management at Allbirds.
But perhaps an even bigger issue was that the brand was missing out on sales because of the lack of a unified way to manage and sell inventory across sales channels. “We would lose sales due to stock outs because our retail inventory wasn’t available for our online customers to purchase,” says Micah. “Only warehouse inventory was available for online sales.” Fortunately, Ship from Store proved to be the ideal solution for helping Allbirds overcome these challenges.
The Solution: Connecting sales, customer, and inventory data through Shopify
Allbirds was already equipping their retail staff with Shopify POS to enable an “endless aisle” shopping experience through omnichannel capabilities such as buy in store, ship to customer technology. But they knew they could still make improvements. “We considered adding Ship from Store because to unlock the richest assortment of inventory available for our customers across every sales channel and boost our bottom line at the same time,” says Micah.
The team followed a carefully planned, phased approach to testing and implementing Ship from Store. Their pilot test showed promising results and opportunities for improvement. “The early data was validating,” says Micah. “But also helped hone our feedback to Shopify on what improvements were needed before we could scale to our entire fleet of stores.”
Soon after the pilot, Allbirds deployed a four-wave launch strategy with gradually increasing daily order volumes, ensuring any issues were identified and resolved prior to reaching greater scale. Micah notes how the team took advantage of Shopify’s APIs and third-party app ecosystem to develop custom workflows tailored to various stakeholders’ needs, such as the ability to schedule store operating days or hours available for Ship from Store and maximum order quantities allocated to each store per day.
All of these steps helped ensure that Ship from Store met Allbirds’ objectives and rolled out within their desired timelines. "By outlining the opportunity, securing cross-functional alignment prior to the start, and committing to getting it done on time, deploying Ship from Store was one of the better run projects we’ve deployed at Allbirds,” says Micah.
The Results: Soaring omnichannel growth
Ship from Store has transformed Allbirds’ inventory management and customer service capabilities. As Micah puts it, “We have wider and more consistent assortments online and in store. Stores love it since over 50% of the product we ship from the store is generally slower moving inventory, which offers them back that space so they can sell more.”
The brand has seen their website conversion rates rise after adding Ship from Store thanks to their retail inventory becoming available for online customers to purchase. This has helped Allbirds save significant shipping and labor costs. “We reduced the quantity of products we ship back to our warehouse after a season is complete and are maximizing our retail labor workforce during downtime,” says Micah. Retail staff have also shared positive feedback on the solution. “Many of our store leaders have experience with other brands’ ship from store efforts and are very impressed with Shopify’s solution,” says Micah. “We have a lot of Voice of the Employee (VoE) praising the simplicity of our fulfillment process!”
Through Shopify, Allbirds has created a truly unified commerce experience that maximizes efficiency, delights customers, and positions the brand for continued global success.
With our sales channels unified on Shopify, we’re able to provide a consistent shopping experience between retail and ecommerce customers. We have more opportunities to delight our customers while providing greater flexibility to corporate teams. Our customers have benefitted from faster shipping, a wider assortment both online and in stores, and the convenience of buying and returning in either direction.
