At the forefront of American menswear, Buck Mason rapidly expanded from a five-person "garage band" in 2014 to a retail powerhouse with over 50 stores nationwide. This growth was powered by a scrappy, build-it-all ethos and a homegrown tech stack, created from the ground up by co-founder and CTO Nick Merwin.
But as the brand prepared for its next phase of growth, it faced a critical decision: continue to build everything in-house, or partner with a platform that could provide the scale and flexibility they needed to win.
By choosing Shopify for its ecommerce platform, Buck Mason has:
- Achieved significant operational efficiency, allowing them to reinvest in product R&D and an accelerated retail expansion.
- Empowered its digital and merchandising teams with the agility to independently manage the online store.
- Gained invaluable peace of mind with a rock-solid, enterprise-grade checkout.
Challenge: A custom platform that no longer suits their scale
From its inception, Buck Mason’s technology was built with a hacker mentality. To accommodate a unique product bundling feature that wasn’t readily available at the time, Nick and another Buck partner, Lee Donahoe, built a custom ecommerce site from scratch. As the company grew and opened its first retail stores, Nick rebuilt the backend of that simple app and it snowballed into a comprehensive, all-in-one system that managed everything from inventory and order management to a custom-built point of sale.
While this homegrown platform provided a competitive edge and operational simplicity for years, the brand's rapid growth began to reveal its limitations. “Our digital department needed a more ergonomic way to handle merchandising and template updates,” says Nick. “They didn't want to keep bugging the tech team to make changes to the site—they wanted easy CMS capabilities.”
In 2018, we decided to integrate Shopify for ecommerce primarily. And that was because our digital department was needing a more, like, ergonomic way to do digital merchandising and template updates.
Additionally, as the company scaled to 40 retail stores, the complexity of keeping inventory levels perfectly synced between their internal system and the online storefront became a mission-critical challenge.
“The last thing we want as a brand is for customers to order things that are out of stock,” Nick says. “It becomes a customer service and trust issue, which is why inventory syncing is of the utmost importance.”
Solution: Stitching together a strategic platform partnership
In 2018, Buck Mason's leadership decided to integrate Shopify to power their ecommerce front-end. But this wasn't just a technical decision—it was a philosophical alignment.
Knowing the story of Shopify having been built by other Rails developers, I had a feeling there was going to be an ethos of developer friendliness and developer API ergonomics that was like an edict for the company, you know, a forever edict. Shopify kind of embodied that ethos.
For Nick, a career-long Ruby on Rails developer, the choice was clear. He knew Shopify was built on the same framework and shared a commitment to the open-source community. “Knowing Shopify was built by other Rails developers, I had a feeling there was going to be an ethos of developer friendliness and ergonomic APIs—that it was an edict for the company,” he adds.
The solution was not to replace their powerful, custom-built backend, but to augment it. Buck Mason integrated its internal order and inventory management system directly with Shopify, using Shopify to handle the customer-facing experience, product catalog, and checkout.
This hybrid approach gave them the best of both worlds: the operational control of a custom system and the world-class features and flexibility of Shopify's commerce platform.
This hybrid approach unlocked powerful capabilities:
- Custom inventory syncing: Unit-level inventory data flows to Shopify via metafields, enabling real-time distance searches for in-store pickup
- Advanced omnichannel features: Built their own Buy Online, Pick Up In Store (BOPIS) and Ship From Store functionality years before Shopify offered native solutions
- Flexible order routing: Customers can route individual line items to different pickup locations across their 40+ store network
Shopify and its plugin ecosystem is a conduit for our digital teams to experiment. They can try things out in production without having to come to the tech team first.
This flexibility extends to critical back-end functions as well. When the time came to switch payment processors, the team was able to make the change with a single click in their Shopify admin, an undertaking that would have been a massive, multi-stakeholder project on another platform.
Results: Seamless operations make room for faster expansion
By offloading the most critical and complex part of online retail—the checkout—to Shopify, Buck Mason gained more than just a powerful platform; they gained peace of mind. “The most important thing is having a rock-solid checkout and not getting a text at 2 a.m. that our home-built checkout is down,” says Nick.
Not having to worry about site stability, reliability, and business continuity takes a whole sector of budget off the table, and we can use it however we see fit.
Unprecedented operational efficiency
This stability has allowed Buck Mason to operate with extreme efficiency. The tech team remains remarkably lean—essentially just Nick as the programmer and an IT manager—while supporting a business that has grown from five people to over 50 retail locations and Bloomingdale's stores nationwide.
This operational simplicity is core to Nick's philosophy: "The smaller number of systems that we have running at any given point, the better." Their unified approach means enabling faster decision-making and implementation.
The resources saved have fueled product R&D and an aggressive retail expansion strategy. As online customer acquisition costs rose around 2020, Buck Mason doubled down on store openings as a controlled, consistent revenue driver. The time it takes for new stores to become profitable has steadily decreased, creating a repeatable expansion model.
Clear path to ambitious growth
Buck Mason is looking to continue growing their reach with several new destination stores across America's premier shopping districts.
As Nick explains, "We have a clear path to 70 and I think an aspirational path to 100. At that point it feels like saturation is imminent." Beyond domestic expansion, international growth is also on the horizon.
Team empowerment and competitive agility
The Shopify integration has transformed how Buck Mason's teams operate. The digital merchandising team can now experiment with A/B tests, try new review platforms, and implement marketing campaigns without technical bottlenecks.
This agility has given Buck Mason "a competitive advantage to be able to move fast and implement things like BOPIS and Ship From Store in an omnichannel sense faster than if we were to have bought a bunch of independent systems" that require "tenuously connected" integrations.
A future-ready foundation tailored for tomorrow
With Shopify as their trusted partner for commerce, Buck Mason has a solid foundation to continue its impressive growth, confident they have a platform that is ready to scale with them as they expand into new markets and channels.
The partnership enables Buck Mason to focus their limited resources on what matters most: product development, customer experience, and strategic expansion. As Nick puts it, they can "allocate budget to things that build the brand itself and, you know, acquire customers" rather than getting "saddled with a lot of technical debt and tenuously connected systems that require additional people or consultants."
This approach—building what's uniquely essential while buying flexible, ecosystem-rich capabilities—has created a blueprint for sustainable growth that other ambitious retail brands can follow. Buck Mason proves that operational simplicity, when executed thoughtfully, becomes a powerful competitive advantage.
