Founded in 2004, PAIGE is an international fashion brand for men and women known for their premium denim and lifestyle collections. Co-Founder and Creative Director, Paige Adams-Geller, leveraged her experience as the industry's top fit model to ensure that comfort, flattering silhouettes, and quality are paramount.
Today, PAIGE is sold in over 80 countries by more than 1,000 retailers, including their own stores across California, New York, Texas, Nashville, Charleston, Scottsdale, and London. But as the brand expanded their retail footprint and customer shopping behaviors evolved toward true omnichannel engagement, PAIGE faced limitations with their commerce tools that hindered their ability to provide a seamless shopping experience.
By migrating to Shopify, PAIGE has unified their operations, enhanced their customer experience, and created a foundation for continued growth and innovation. The results have been transformative. With Shopify, PAIGE has:
- Unified customer data across all channels, enabling personalized service regardless of purchase locations
- Enabled flexible fulfillment options, leading to retail locations fulfilling 17% of online orders during most recent holiday season
- Reduced retail staff training time from two weeks to just 1-2 days
- Increased online conversion rates by 50%
The Challenge: Fragmented commerce stack limits customization and scale
Before Shopify, PAIGE felt a disconnect in managing their business online and offline. "Our previous commerce tools for online and our POS system were not fully integrated," explains Sofie Kuehnen, Head of Global Retail Operations at PAIGE. "We didn't have a seamless customer experience from an order perspective, and our team was working really hard to try to create the image of that experience."
This fragmentation created significant operational challenges. If a customer called a retail store asking for an update on an online order, store associates had no visibility into that information. "Our teams did the best to try to mitigate that and provide a good customer experience, but what was really happening was that we were having to use back channels to communicate with our customer service team or managers to try to get that information for the customer," says Sofie.
The limitations extended to the online shopping experience as well. Their previous platform couldn't support basic features like zoom functionality on product images or the ability to unify product assortments on a single page without expending significant development resources. "When we have one fit of denim, the customer wants to be able to see every single wash and every single inseam within that fit. We weren't able to do things like that," Sofie notes. These constraints prevented PAIGE from mirroring online the exceptional personalized experience customers received in their retail stores.
As PAIGE looked toward future growth, particularly international expansion, they realized they needed a solution that could support their ambitions.
We were trying to simplify and automate, but in doing so we were just adding additional tools to our tech stack.
As the brand shifted more toward a unified approach, they realized how much their inability to customize their existing commerce platform was holding them back. That's when they turned to Shopify.
The Solution: A unified commerce experience with Shopify
PAIGE undertook a comprehensive implementation of Shopify's unified commerce platform, completing the transition of their online store and over 20 retail locations in just a month and a half. Working with Shopify and implementation partner Pattern, they created a truly seamless experience that unified their operations and elevated the customer journey.
"Migrating a business of our size is always going to have its challenges, but even though it was a pretty heavy load, Shopify provided us with a lot of resources and support throughout the process," says Sofie. "They provided us with platform access well in advance to the transition—about a year in advance—and that was very cost favorable for us as we were managing both sides, but it also allowed us to pace out the work."
Shopify helped transform both the online and in-store experience. Online, PAIGE was able to streamline their product organization by consolidating multiple washes for each fit onto a single product page, drastically reducing the number of pages they needed to maintain. This simplified approach better showcased their full assortment using zoom functionality and product videos that helped customers better understand fit and style—providing the expert guidance customers are accustomed to in PAIGE stores. "Being able to really mirror the experience that we had in our retail stores with our online site, while simplifying backend management, has been really impactful," says Sofie.
Shopify also unified PAIGE's customer data and order management across channels, a crucial step in unlocking the improved customer experiences and growth the team strives to achieve.
In-store, Shopify POS dramatically simplified operations and training. Sofie describes it as a "game changer."
With our previous commerce tool, it would take us about two weeks to get our team trained and up and running. With Shopify, it takes about one to two days.
Sofie emphasizes how these time savings allow PAIGE's retail teams to spend more time with customers, providing an optimal experience in-store. She also shares how the teams have provided "only positive feedback" about Shopify POS, demonstrating a true appreciation for how the solution has improved workflows and training experiences.
Operationally, the biggest shift has been being able to centralize the customer information, both retail customers and online customers. Now if a customer purchased online and they call a retail store, it doesn't matter where they originally purchased. We're able to provide them with those answers.
The Results: Operational excellence drives new era of global growth
The implementation of Shopify has led to remarkable results for PAIGE, transforming both customer experience and operational efficiency.
The brand's unified commerce approach has significantly improved the online shopping experience, leading to a 50% increase in conversion rates. The integration of Shop Pay has been particularly impactful, with customers immediately recognizing and trusting the checkout experience. Sofie emphasizes how this trust has led to results, saying, "The customer is able to identify Shop Pay and they know it's going to be one or two clicks. They understand how quick that checkout is going to be."
With unified customer data and order management across channels, PAIGE is providing true omnichannel fulfillment capabilities—including Ship from Store—that have been crucial during peak shopping periods. "Being able to utilize the shipping capabilities of Shopify POS has really helped us during the holiday season," says Sofie. "During one of our busiest months, December, our retail locations were able to fulfill 17% of online orders. That really helped us with the customer experience because we wanted to make sure that we were able to get customers orders as quickly as possible."
Being able to ship customer orders from store locations closest to them that have the inventory was amazing for our business.
The platform's flexibility has supported PAIGE's international expansion plans as well. Shopify's multi-storefront capabilities allowed PAIGE to manage their international presence and keep operations separate between different countries while handling different currencies and region-specific requirements. They could also offer localized payment options, with Sofie noting that "utilizing UnionPay has been really impactful."
"There may not have been a PAIGE UK store without Shopify," she adds. "When we were looking to expand into the UK, we knew that some of the challenges we had with our previous tool were not going to enable us to do that. We actually launched our first UK store on Shopify, and it's been great."
With Shopify, PAIGE has finally been able to provide the highest level of service to customers across all touchpoints, creating the seamless, personalized connections —regardless of where or how customers choose to engage with the brand.
It's really important for us that we're creating an environment, whether it's in our wholesale accounts or online or in store, where the customer walks into our store and they feel deeply connected to the brand. I think that has always been at our foundation.
Looking Ahead
PAIGE is focused on continued retail expansion, particularly in the UK market, and further enhancing their customer experience through customization. They're developing custom POS UI extensions to capture SMS subscriptions at point of sale and exploring ways to personalize the online experience based on whether a customer is new or returning.
"For PAIGE, we're really looking towards more retail store expansion," says Sofie. "We're really focused on expanding more in the UK. We just opened up another store in November, and that wouldn't have been possible without Shopify, so we're really looking towards more UK expansion and just further anchoring ourselves in communities where the customer's already shopping the brand."
With Shopify as their foundation, PAIGE can now focus on growth and innovation rather than managing technology limitations.
Shopify has really helped us have the foundation that we needed to scale up, but also allowing us to be able to customize to make it unique to our business and unique to our customer experience.