Richie Stapler and Bruno Lima founded Pura in 2014 to disrupt the fragrance industry. Stapler's passion for cologne since his early teens, and Lima's expertise in manufacturing and supply chain laid the foundation for their venture. Pura introduced a novel concept of smart home fragrance, combining clean, luxury scents with cutting-edge technology and a unique app, allowing users to customize and control their scent experience.
Pura has transformed how people experience scents at home and in vehicles, selling over 4 million smart diffusers through both DTC and retail channels, including over 100 nationwide retailers. They have partnered with leading companies like Capri Blue, Nest New York, Anthropologie, and Brooklyn Candle to bring top fragrances to customers' homes.
In late 2018, Pura launched its direct-to-consumer business on Shopify, marking the start of a transformative partnership for their e-commerce operations. marking the beginning of what would become a transformative partnership for the brand's e-commerce operations, with a mindset of continual innovation.
On Shopify, Pura has achieved remarkable results:
- Increased conversion rates by 100% after relaunching on a custom Shopify theme
- Reduced subscriber churn by nearly 60% over three years
- Cut B2B operational time by 80% through Shopify B2B implementation
- Improved checkout conversion rates up to 15% with Unified Checkout
- Reduced development time related to checkout functionality by 50%
- Improved Customer Acquisition Costs and ROAS by over 20% on the Shop App by leveraging Shop Campaigns
Challenge: Scaling digital operations while growing rapidly
Pura is a hyper-growth company. And while that growth is welcome, it also has been at the root of many of the challenges the company has faced.
As Pura’s DTC business continued its impressive growth, they knew they needed a robust website that could support both its burgeoning subscription business and one-time purchase operations while delivering a premium brand experience.
"We were at a critical moment,” says Cory. “The company was growing, the subscription business was growing, the one-time purchase business was growing. But we really needed a website that fit the brand we were trying to build and the customer experience that we wanted in order to acquire as many customers as fast as possible.”
The rapid expansion created organizational challenges as well. As the team grew, aligning people, processes, and technology became increasingly complex.
Additionally, the evolving digital landscape made customer acquisition increasingly difficult. Pura was under pressure to find new and efficient channels to reach potential customers while maintaining the agility needed to launch new products and enter new markets quickly.
Solution: A scalable digital foundation on Shopify
Platform speed and simplicity drive competitive advantage
Pura needed to launch and expand fast to meet their goals. A custom theme on Shopify, as they saw it, was the fastest solution around—in every respect, whether that’s launching new products and features or evaluating the success of marketing campaigns.
Now on Shopify, out-of-the-box functionality for engineers makes it easier and quicker for them to deploy and make changes.
“I've come from other platforms where you're on a dev cycle that's two weeks or four weeks,” says Cory. “It takes forever to get a change in.”
On Shopify we could make 30 deployments in a week if needed. We can publish a new promotion or marketing moment on our website and make five deployments in an hour.
The timeline to launch products has dramatically improved. Beginning with the Pura 4 Wall Device, since 2023, the company has now launched several new products for cars and tabletops, with a mission of disrupting even more staid spaces. The process of launching those products on Shopify has been simple.
“Our merchandisers are all already in the tools,” Cory explains, “so it’s easy to set up new products and create all the attributes we need to launch a new product. We haven't needed all of these third party systems like a CMS or PIM that make it much more complicated with more integrations and engineering work. Now we’re doing launches all the time, including fifteen or more new fragrances every year.”
We schedule the publishing party, we're done in a half an hour, the product is launched, moving on to the next.
This streamlining applies all the way through a wide range of business functionalities, creating speed across the organization. For instance, because analytics takes place right on Shopify rather than in a third-party app, a marketer can quickly see how campaigns are performing, evaluate whether or not to make a pivot, to change up landing pages or assets, to pull or push the campaign, and so forth on down the decision-making pipeline.
For business users, self-service tools enable agility. Now anyone on the Pura team can make changes and implement new features without heavy reliance on engineering resources.
Shopify thinks of the business user first. It’s clicks over code.
And it’s not just about what’s out-of-the-box for the business; it’s also about what the engineering team can build custom on Shopify for that business user, then step back without having to support that new function.
One great example of that is the customizer Pura’s engineering team built for the company’s all-important merchandiser partners to surprise and delight customers with a gift with purchase. Most companies that offer similar strategies have to be on multiple platforms to do so. Now that Pura’s engineering team has built this custom feature, it’s just a few clicks to reuse on future promotions..
“Implementation is very smooth,” says Cory, speaking both to the initial implementation and also to the roll out of new features supporting new business strategies. “If you're focused and you have the right team, you're talking in weeks, not quarters, which is huge for the business.”
Subscription management integration powers recurring revenue growth
Pura turned to the Shopify app ecosystem and Recharge to power the subscriptions functionality at the core of their new DTC model. This integration allowed Pura to manage its subscription offerings efficiently while maintaining the flexibility to adapt as the business evolved.
The benefit, as Cory sees it, has been twofold. On the business backend, processing subscriptions natively in Shopify through the Recharge integration means streamlining the connection between two great platforms so that the Pura team can easily create products and attributes with instant sharing.
On the customer side, it’s just set it and forget it.
“For the customer, it’s, ‘I signed up, I know my subscription cadence, I know when it's coming, I know when to swap,’” says Cory, summarizing the customer experience. “On the backend, those two systems are working together so seamlessly that orders are created and processed, the customer is happy, and they get to enjoy fragrance.”
Streamlined checkout reduces friction at the point of purchase
Pura implemented Shopify Payments and Shop Pay to streamline the payment process for customers while giving the company greater control over the checkout experience. This integration simplified the purchasing journey and reduced friction at key conversion points. In addition to one page checkout, Pura now offers options like Shop Pay Installments and Shop Cash as incentives for conversion on the Shop App.
“The migration to unified checkout helped us get more and more people onto Shopify payments,” Cory says. “It's just better for customers, there are fewer friction points. Storing all of that information makes checkout really fast for them.”
Expanded sales channels helps Pura meet customers where they are
Like most brands, Pura sought ways to open up additional sales channels and create new opportunities for both customer engagement and revenue generation beyond the company’s primary website.
“Everyone is looking for new sales channels,” says Cory. “This one just comes with Shopify Plus. It’s a great tool to leverage, and it doesn't require a ton of investment or work because of the seamlessness of how Shopify built it.”
Instead of having to stand up on all these other marketplace platforms, the Shop App is built in with Shopify. It's just a matter of sharing your catalog and merchandising the experience.
The Shop App provided Pura with an additional sales channel to reach customers where they were already shopping. This expansion of touchpoints created new opportunities for customer engagement and revenue generation beyond the company's primary website.
“The Shop App comes with Shopify Plus, so why wouldn’t we use it, right?” says Cory. “We took some of our merchandisers and had them set up a store, put a little TLC towards it to see what we could do. It’s performed amazingly. It’s right in the Shopify admin portal. It allows us to address people who might shop exclusively on the Shop app as that’s where they live. Ever since we've done that, our customer acquisition and ROAS have been solid.”
Shop App accelerates expansion of digital reach while controlling desired CAC and ROAS targets
Pura's presence on the Shop App has driven strong double-digit year-over-year revenue growth and new customer acquisition within the channel. This channel has become an increasingly important part of Pura's overall digital strategy, providing consistent results even as other digital marketing channels have become more challenging.
“We have probably run fifty different campaigns,” says Cory. “Some might last three days, our evergreen campaigns might last three quarters.”
Each campaign targets different audiences in a “surgical manner”, even when the target is large, in order to be strategic about ROAS and CAC.
This enables the team to be highly strategic, especially during peak periods, whether that’s BFCM, Labor Day, Memorial Day, or so forth.
It should be a part of your strategic pillars for your go to market strategy: what are we doing in the Shop app? What are we doing with Shop Campaigns? People are active in their shopping, and there's a chance to really drive meaningful new customer growth and revenue within that app.
Precision marketing tools target customer acquisition, conversion, and retention
In recent years, Pura has faced the same headwinds in acquisition as most companies, with paid media in particular getting harder. During this time, Pura has leaned hard into out-of-the-box acquisition tools on Shopify. In fact, Cory credits Shopify with getting ahead of the problem with innovations the Pura team hadn’t been anticipating they’d be needing—until they did.
“When you are in the hyper-growth phase and looking to acquire as many customers as possible as fast as possible to beat your competitors,” says Cory, “you have to be on the cutting edge of finding the right audience, building out that cohort, targeting that audience, and speaking to them with the right message.”
They turned to both native Shopify features and tools and ecosystem apps to do so.
Shopify Audiences allowed us to leverage the Shopify ecosystem, which is massive, to find customers who are lookalikes to our customer, prospective customers, or potentially have already seen some of our paid advertising, and then be able to target them in our paid accounts across Meta, Google, and TikTok. We’ve seen great returns on that—improved ROAS, improved CAC.
“Being able to find those prospective and lookalike customers when you're a hyper growth company is critical. Any edge we can get targeting the right consumer with the ad dollars that we have is critical for our business. In leveraging Shopify audiences…we could see up to 30 percent improvements on CAC and ROAS depending on the campaign.”
“We've seen great returns on that, improved ROAS, improved CAC,” says Cory. “It's a part of a larger advertising strategy and plays an effective role in customer acquisition.”
In the Shop App, Shop Campaigns has enabled Pura to implement targeted customer acquisition efforts during key promotional periods to incentivize new customers while maintaining control over promotional spending.
“The way I like to explain Shop Campaigns is that it's using a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer,” says Cory. “You can be very prescriptive with what you need. ‘I need this return on ad spend at this CAC.’ I can scale up, I can scale down, I can decide when to start my campaign, when to stop it, who I’m speaking to. Being able to do that in the world of paid media is difficult. We're all used to spending money on Meta and hoping something comes back. With Shop Campaigns we more strategically targeted the right consumer and all of those daily active users in the Shop App.”
With Shop Campaigns bringing new customers into the funnel, Pura can engage with them to try and get them to convert to subscribers through their app, offering things like more incentives, warranties, free cancellations, and unlimited fragrance swaps.
It shouldn’t be surprising, perhaps, that Cory and the team at Pura have made the Shop App, Shop Campaigns, and Shopify Audiences a core part of their go-to-market strategy—and a steady part of their revenue stream.
Together, these strategies have helped Pura stay on its toes, innovating faster and experimenting with more business strategies for acquiring and converting more customers faster, then keeping them around.
Results: Measurable impact that passes the sniff test
Better customer experiences double conversion rates and decrease customer churn by 60%
When the team relaunched the website, they did so with a strong emphasis on experimentation to understand what would build the best conversion funnels.
“When we relaunched on our own custom theme and started to test with some of our new funnels on the site...We saw 100 percent improvement in our conversion rate,” says Cory.
The team has continued to experiment with test landing pages, A/B tests, and split URL tests—all experiments they can run easily with Shopify to quickly increase conversion rates.
Churn rates have decreased by almost sixty percent over the past three years, thanks both to Shopify and the third-party ecosystem apps. Some of the capabilities that most reduced churn were simple and intuitive, like giving their customers better insight into when their items were coming with Shopify native inventory tracking. The team also added their own innovations, such as building a customized automation to protect subscribers by ensuring they never oversold a product and delayed fulfillment.
“You have to do the basics of eCommerce right in today's climate,” says Cory. “Otherwise you'll lose those customers forever. It's too expensive to get them back. Your goal should always be to keep the customer that you already have.”
Optimized checkout increases conversion rate by 15%
The migration to Unified Checkout further enhanced the customer experience while reducing development time.
“Completing the unified checkout migration which helped move more of our order processing to Shopify Payments improved CVR up to 15% as advertised," Cory confirms. This improvement came alongside a 50% reduction in development time related to checkout functionality.
When you start to have a high visitor, high session business like we do, especially with a high number of active users, a small change in conversion rate can transform your business.
Throughout Pura's growth journey, Shopify's platform stability has remained rock-solid, even during high-traffic events like Black Friday Cyber Monday. This reliability has provided the foundation needed for a fast-growing e-commerce operation, ensuring that Pura can capitalize on peak selling periods without technical limitations.
Pura Enhances B2B Efficiency and Retailer Confidence with Shopify B2B
Challenge: Managing B2B wholesale accounts
Several years after the DTC launch, Pura began to see strong growth in their B2B efforts. But it was tough to manage the large scale of B2B wholesale accounts, which relied heavily on manual processes.
“It was so human-intensive to just set up an account and to process an order,” says Cory. “I was shocked when I discovered how intensive it was.”
Solution: A scalable B2B shopping experience on Shopify B2B
B2B solutions transform the wholesale experience
To continue our strong growth in the B2B space, the operations were in need of technical innovation in order to scale faster.
“We are an omni channel business,” says Cory. “We want to be direct-to-consumer, we want to work with our brand partners, and we want to work in the retail space.”
And work in the retail space they sure do: with marquee brands like Target and Anthropologie on their rolls, they’ve successfully reached the mass consumer.
But remember, the goal of Pura’s founders was to disrupt the whole industry—and that means working with boutique retailers across the country focused on fragrance, lotions, and other spa-like experiences. To sell Pura devices, in other words, “to whoever the customer is, wherever they are in the country.”
That goal was complicated to achieve prior to Shopify B2B.
“Prior to launching on Shopify B2B, it was all email communication, manual order processing, manual payment processing, sending emails for updates on where the order was in fulfillment,” says Cory.
“Errors were made, wrong numbers of cartons were ordered, products weren't arriving on time, wrong amounts were charged on the credit card,” says Cory. “These are small businesses, and when you make a mistake or they don't get the product on time, they don't have a ton of free cash flow to cover it. That is their livelihood…They need to sell it to be able to buy more.”
On Shopify, Pura has built a B2B-friendly infrastructure, with cartons versus individual units, paired with a seamless, regular online checkout experience. It’s easy to set up individual storefronts for each retailer, and to provide them with a unified checkout that is built from the same architecture as their DTC brand. This also allows retailers to order for multiple stores in a franchise. All they have to do is reload their cart, send it to the next store, and they’ll know exactly when they can expect to put it on shelves.
Automated workflows give B2B businesses seamless experiences that build loyalty
Switching to Shopify dramatically streamlined the B2B customer experience, ensuring a smooth process for retailers that encouraged them to stay with the brand.
Shopify B2B automated and streamlined a lot of that process. Eighty percent of the time was spent getting an account set up to get an order placed. Now it’s easier to get that account set up. It's easier for them to have their own specific catalog with their own terms.
And that’s not where it ends. With Shopify B2B, Pura retailers can log on to a personalized website, have exclusive access, add things to cart, and checkout without having to send spreadsheets back and forth. “Even though it's B2B," Cory says, "there's still human beings on the other end. And they just want to shop like it's a website.”
“Retailers’ confidence in us has increased,” says Cory. “Their cart values have increased because it's a much better online shopping experience, and their repeat purchase rates have improved. They're able to take that faith of getting the product, reselling it, and then continuing to repurchase.”
A partnership that smells like success
Shopify has been an integral part of Pura's remarkable growth story, providing the technological foundation that has enabled the company to scale rapidly while maintaining operational efficiency and a premium customer experience.
Looking ahead, Pura continues to seek opportunities to streamline its operations while maintaining functionality. They’re continuing to explore Shopify’s innovations and capabilities to fuel future growth, with plans to explore features like Shopify Collective within the year.
Through its partnership with Shopify, Pura has not only achieved faster growth and better margins but has positioned itself for continued success in the competitive smart home fragrance market. As the company continues to innovate and expand, Shopify remains a crucial enabler of its ambitious vision.
Now that’s what we call passing the sniff test.