With its commitment to the highest-quality organic cotton, artisanal manufacturing techniques, and fair treatment of workers across its traceable supply chain, luxury sustainable bedding brand Boll & Branch’s focus on conscious craftsmanship could almost be considered old-fashioned. Yet the company’s approach to commerce has always been thoroughly modern, beginning with its founding 10 years ago by Scott and Missy Tannen in New Jersey, as a digitally native business. “We’re now rapidly expanding to physical locations through wholesale and retail partnerships,” says chief commercial officer Katia Unlu, “but e-commerce has been in our DNA since day one and represents the biggest portion of our sales.” To streamline its operations and transform the stories of its products into engaging, accessible, unique buying experiences for its customers, the company has long partnered with Shopify.
“Since 2016, Boll & Branch has been a merchant on Shopify, because customer centricity is at the heart of everything they do,” says Unlu. Perhaps best known for its consumer-facing Shop app and convenient Shop Pay checkout, the platform recently introduced Hydrogen, its flexible, “headless” framework that allows brands to create unique front-end experiences while seamlessly integrating with Shopify’s robust back-end data, including products and customer information. Recognizing its potential, the bedding brand swiftly migrated to Hydrogen this October, efficiently consolidating its commerce strategy inside and out. By integrating its different sales channels, data and systems, Shopify provides Boll & Branch with a holistic overview of its business while also creating a seamless shopping experience for its customers. “Hydrogen’s flexibility enables us to tailor our front-end presence in a manner of minutes to reflect our brand story and values, then smoothly follow through with sales,” says Unlu.
ORIGIN STORIES
As a purveyor of sustainable products, Boll & Branch knows its customers value where their goods come from and how they get to their homes. To make the ethics of its assortment crystal clear, the company developed a bespoke feature on its website called Origin Track. By entering the lot number listed on the hangtag, consumers can pull up the history of an item. “From when the cotton was grown to how it was ginned, weaved and finished, you can trace the journey across our entire supply chain,” says Unlu. Whereas previously such information was stored in the back-end for the brand’s internal reference, this new feature surfaces it to consumers.
Origin Track highlights the flexibility of Shopify, allowing brands like Boll & Brand to easily create features and storefronts that convey their brand story. While the platform offers multiple preexisting themes, partners can choose to develop custom solutions that better align with their creative vision or commercial objective. “Shopify empowers us to connect with our customers on a deeper level through the way we present our products,” adds Unlu.
BUNDLE UP
Partner brands also have the advantage of adopting the platform’s latest innovations first. To enable its customers to pick and choose individual items to style their own unique bedding sets—a practice commonly known as “bundling”—Boll & Branch spent more than six months building its own proprietary function, only to have Shopify roll out a solution shortly thereafter. The brand quickly ditched its homegrown version (and the additional cost of maintaining it), embracing the efficiency and effectiveness of the platform’s native app instead.
“It’s a perfect example of how being a part of the Shopify ecosystem provides early access to both its own development pipeline and hundreds of smart third-party apps, allowing us to focus on growth rather than squandering time and money making and managing our own,” says Unlu. Now Boll & Branch’s homepage includes a Bundles tab with a drop-down of various categories that let customers curate a luxuriously layered look with ease. The brand’s Black Friday bedding promotion—which the Boll & Branch team built and launched on the site in a matter of minutes—pairs two of its most popular products, a sheet set and a waffle blanket, with one of its deepest discounts of the year. An eye-catching red tile designates that the offer is available for a limited time only. “That level of customization—the ability to instantaneously create and publish original content, targeted discounts and time-sensitive landing pages for seasonal campaigns—is all due to Shopify’s Hydrogen solution,” she says.
WHERE IT’S APP
Acting as both an extension of the website and a mobile-first shopping experience, the Shop app does more than just make it easy to order Boll & Branch pillowcases from your phone. It positions the brand to a whole new audience. Maybe consumers stumble upon its storefront by clicking through “featured brands” or “bedding” recommendations while browsing in the “home” category, creating new opportunities for engagement and sales. And maybe someone might just decide to search for “organic cotton sheets” while they’re buying toothpaste. “The Shop app features every merchant on Shopify, all in one place, so it’s a great discovery tool,” says Unlu.
In addition to exposing the brand to new customers, the Shop app provides what Boll & Branch refers to as a “massive” testing ground for promotional strategies and marketing campaigns. “It’s a wonderful, low-risk way to try out merchandizing ideas and publish new content before we officially introduce them on our website,” says Unlu. For the Boll & Branch team, ease of use is another bonus. “The app requires no dev resources whatsoever to operate,” she continues. “No programmers necessary; just regular e-commerce people.”
On the flip side, while the brand can isolate new content to the Shop app in order to test the waters, customers can access and track their orders no matter where they make their initial purchase—on the app, the website, or in Boll & Branch’s burgeoning fleet of brick-and-mortar stores. “It’s such friendly technology, because, again, it puts the customer at the forefront,” says Unlu. Since Boll & Branch started tapping into the possibilities of the Shop app for its holiday 2023 season, it has experienced what she describes as “tremendous growth.” A case study the company commissioned with Shopify reports nearly $1 million sales from Shop Campaigns in less than a year, as well as a 12 percent increase in return on ad spend from extending their campaigns to platforms like Meta and Google.
To further accelerate checkout, Shopify’s convenient and secure Shop Pay—which can be used on participating websites, apps and social media—saves the customer’s email, credit card and shipping information so they can check out in one tap. “No matter what Shopify merchant you’re buying from, with a Shop account you’re immediately signed in and don’t need to retype your details,” says Unlu. Among Shopify’s most popular features for customers and merchants alike, it’s Boll & Branch’s top payment option.
STREET SMARTS
Just as any order can be accessed and tracked across Boll & Branch’s website and its storefront on the Shop app, so too can it be purchased and delivered from the brand’s physical locations. “Today, we have eight stores, with plans to double that number in the new year,” says Unlu. “Underlying them all is Shopify’s POS.” The point-of-sale system compiles a unified customer profile, sparing the individual stores from coming up with their own customer relationship management software—all in addition to powering every in-store purchase. “If someone who already spends a lot of money with us online walks into their neighborhood store for the first time, new to our retail experience, the sales associate can reference their order history right away,” she explains. Because Boll & Branch has been a Shopify merchant for eight years, it has a deep, singular well of customer data that rolls over with each new app or upgrade the brand adopts. The company also deploys other tech tools that pair seamlessly with Shopify to access data, enabling impactful touches like personalized email campaigns informed by the client’s profile or shopping patterns.
As part of its retail expansion, the company also plans to implement “buy online, pick up in-store” and “buy online, fulfill from store” options. When it moved to Hydrogen, Boll & Branch simplified its product catalog, making individual items easier for sales associates to track down. And due to the interconnectivity of its Shopify network, the bedding company can easily complete and ship an in-store order even when all the desired pieces may not be in stock at the customer’s specific retail outlet: With Shopify’s “endless aisle” strategy, in-store shoppers are not limited by finite shelf space. Rather than sending the customer home to look up missing duvets on their laptop, sales associates can ring up the transaction for the full bedding set, then ship out-of-stock pieces from other locations. This unified commerce approach—combining online and real-world resources—accounts for up to a 40 percent increase in in-store conversions. At present, Boll & Branch’s 2025 retail expansion plan is plenty ambitious on a national scale, but international sales are on the not-too-distant horizon. When that moment arrives, the brand is confident in Shopify’s capacity to handle it based on how effortlessly the platform already manages orders to Canada—and the fact that its software and hardware work in more than 30 countries.
TRADE WINS
While supporting Boll & Branch’s relationships with its retail customers, Shopify also helps the brand prioritize a separate but equally significant sector of its sales. “We’ve increased our trade business twofold in the past two years; it’s a huge portion of our revenue as well, and we have a formal program that we encourage designers to sign up for on our website,” says Unlu. The team looks forward to incorporating Shopify’s tools in a dedicated B2B site slated for 2025. “We’ll create custom online storefronts for trade members like hotel clients that order from us in bulk,” she adds. Discounts, tax reimbursements and other benefits will be automatically applied.
Given Boll & Branch’s all-encompassing agenda, a patchwork approach to e-commerce was never an option. Shopify consolidates everything for the brand: back-end functionality, customer-facing content, convenient payment features and a do-it-all app. “At the end of the day, our core competency is creating sustainable, ethically crafted luxury bed and bath products. Being a tech company is not,” says Unlu. “Shopify’s super simplified tech stack lets Boll & Branch focus on what it does best: make beautiful bedding.”
This story is a paid promotion and was created in partnership with Shopify.
Homepage image: Powered by Shopify across its website, on the Shop app, and in its brick-and-mortar stores, Boll & Branch offers its luxury bed linens as part of special promotions for the holiday season | Courtesy of Boll & Branch
