Headquartered in Melbourne, Brand Collective is one of Australia’s largest retail groups. The company sits at the intersection of Australian fashion, sport, and lifestyle, stewarding household names like Reebok, Superdry, Everlast, and Hush Puppies, alongside cult favourites such as Shoes & Sox, and Volley. With over 300 stores and more than 24 distinct ecommerce storefronts, the group’s digital footprint is vast—but their technology stack was even bigger.
After merging with PAS Group in 2022, Brand Collective made an executive decision to trade platform complexity for customer experience, kicking off a group-wide migration to Shopify in 2023, one brand at a time. By migrating most of their brands to Shopify, the retail group has transformed an unwieldy patchwork of legacy systems into a single, scalable architecture—one that lets a lean team of specialists innovate once and replicate everywhere.
With Shopify, Brand Collective has seen:
- 10% year‑over‑year online sales growth across the group
- 99% decrease in fraud chargebacks, group-wide
- 15-25% increase in checkout conversion rate, depending on brand
- 60% reduction in maintenance overhead
- 50% reduction in new brand launch time, from 6 to 3 months
The challenge: Mixed ecommerce stack demanded extensive resources
Brand Collective’s online retail portfolio originally ran on a tangle of Magento, BigCommerce, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud sites, as well as bespoke builds inherited through acquisitions. Each platform had its own architecture and demanded its own upgrade cycle. Custom tools rarely worked across multiple sites, becoming rigid features that didn’t evolve with the business.
Across dozens of brands, that fragmentation resulted in multiple unique codebases, theme variations, and integrations. Routine tasks—like updating security patches, adding payment methods, or even launching a sale promotion—had to be done from scratch over and over again, consuming extensive developer time that could have been directed into customer-facing value instead.
When you've got such a big portfolio of brands, standardisation and simplification is everything. If you've got 19 brands using 19 different technologies, you're never going to get anywhere. The biggest problem Brand Collective had to solve was around alignment and the standardisation that could enable it.
The diversity of platforms made it difficult to execute on a brand strategy that involved testing labels quickly and iterating. With such a complex and fragmented ecommerce stack, onboarding new brands such as Happy Socks and Champion could take 6 months or more merely to reach feature parity with the group’s existing sites. This limitation threatened commercial momentum.
We don't want to focus on all the hardcore technical aspects behind the scenes—things like hosting or PCI DSS compliance. The highly technical aspects are incredibly important, but Shopify can handle those things for us, which gives Brand Collective the space and resources to worry about our customers, our products, and our brands.
Site reliability and consistency was also an issue, with some brands relying on ecommerce platforms that had inconsistent scalability capability due to third-party hosting, buggy code, and tools that didn’t perform the way they were expected to. This was a problem during peak traffic periods such as the Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) sales.
As a large multi-brand retail group, the ability to onboard new brands quickly and to a high standard is critical to Brand Collective’s overall business strategy. Ongoing optimisation and enhancements are also critical to the long term success of those brands, and that’s made possible by Shopify. We have the ability to test, learn, and scale quickly because of Shopify’s consistent, flexible architecture.
The solution: A unified platform to test, learn, and scale
After deciding to bring uniformity to their online store architecture, Brand Collective chose Shopify as the common backbone for the bulk of their online brands, migrating their labels to Shopify, completing a full-scale transformation or onboarding of 19 brands. With a reliable platform, Brand Collective could execute their brand strategy at scale.
This transformation involved collaboration with partners including Convert Digital during initial migrations, and DotCollective for ongoing optimisation, while Brand Collective's in-house team drove the strategic development and majority of customisation work across the portfolio.
Storefront experience
Brand Collective employed Shopify theme blocks to create site sections with specific capabilities, such as video hosting, that could be whitelabelled and transferred to multiple brand stores and adapted as needed, delivering user-friendly sites at a rapid pace. Shopify’s Metaobjects capabilities also empowered Brand Collective to apply badges on products for promotional purposes, while also helping with product search functionality.
The team also implemented Shopify-native capabilities where possible, such as Shopify Metaobjects, knowing that Shopify would continually improve features over time, removing the need to upgrade and maintain tools internally. The use of native features also made it easier to replicate site functionality from one store to another, while the consistent architecture meant any custom applications were built to deliver group-wide functionality if they needed to be deployed across the portfolio.
Shopify Markets provided the built-in currency conversion and duty calculations needed for Brand Collective to spin up region‑specific storefronts quickly and at scale, catering to customers in multiple markets. This also means the company can expand into new markets at pace without drawing on extensive developer resources to launch additional region-specific stores.
The stability and reliability of the Shopify platform gave Brand Collective the confidence to trust that their online stores would perform as expected during peak traffic periods, such as the Black Friday Cyber Monday sales weekend, without sales being lost due to temperamental website performance.
For a long time, making sure that our websites performed during peak trade periods was a big part of the job, and that is something that could make the team a little anxious. Today, with Shopify, stability and uptime is no longer something we have to worry about. We can have 20,000 people or more shopping at the same time without any issues at all.
Checkout experience
Replacing their previous payment platform, Braintree, with Shopify Payments saw Brand Collective’s payment fraud instances drop to become almost nonexistent, with Shopify fraud prevention tools significantly reducing the need for manual intervention. This saw fraud-related chargebacks slashed by 99% group-wide and simplified reconciliation processes, while providing a smoother checkout experience for customers.
Shopify Extensions for checkout also helped to enhance conversion rates thanks to an improved customer experience, as did Shopify’s one-page checkout. The Shop app has also become a strong growth channel for Brand Collective, driving incremental sales growth thanks to native discovery and real‑time shipping updates. Globally, over 100 million engaged shoppers use the Shop app to discover and purchase products, providing Brand Collective with access to a vast, active audience.
Efficiency and integrations
Meanwhile, Shopify’s AI-enabled commerce assistant Sidekick provides instant insight into factors affecting things such as sales channel performance or transaction bottlenecks. For instance, Brand Collective noticed a drop in user sessions during a month, and queried Sidekick to quickly identify contributing factors, such as an underperforming paid social channel. They swiftly made appropriate adjustments to get things back on track. Previously, this task would have taken hours. Now it takes minutes.
With Shopify, Brand Collective now operates with a unified technology stack built around reusable frameworks, shared themes, and common tooling. This, combined with the ongoing assistance of digital agency partner DotCollective, has enabled the rapid deployment, consistent brand governance, and seamless scalability to support the company’s rapid test, learn, and scale brand strategy approach to scaling up their business across the group.
Before Shopify, we’d need a team of 20 people and an agency to operate. Now, we can do it with a team of six. We can accomplish a complete website migration in around three months, half the time compared to our previous platforms. With Shopify underpinning our entire ecommerce strategy, we can keep our delivery team very lean, even when it’s running 19 stores.
With the flexibility and reliability offered by the Shopify platform, Brand Collective has worked with DotCollective to move faster, reduce complexity, and lay the groundwork for continued growth across their portfolio. A big part of this is powered by the seamless integration of DotCollective’s DotApparel middleware solution to connect Shopify with the Apparel21 enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform.
DotCollective has been able to streamline everything from Brand Collective’s product and inventory synchronisation, to order management and returns. The result is a more efficient, automated setup that supports Brand Collective’s retail operations and helps to deliver a better experience for their customers.
Shopify sits at the centre of our partnership with Brand Collective. It's the platform that powers their digital retail ecosystem, giving us the flexibility to deliver fast, scalable experiences across multiple brands. We've helped them get sites up and running quickly by building a front-end framework they can reuse across brands, which has sped up delivery and ensured consistency.
The results: Repeatable deployment powers brand strategy
Brand Collective’s Shopify implementation represents more than a tech upgrade—it’s a strategic transformation. By consolidating across a single, flexible platform, the group has unlocked scalability, responsiveness, and resilience across their entire digital business. Most importantly, they have been able to execute on their core brand strategy at scale.
With 19 brands now operating on a single codebase, experimentation has become a portfolio‑level activity. The website team can A/B‑test an idea on one store, review it, and roll it out to every store if it proves to be effective, as part of a company-wide methodology that doesn’t require any additional quality assurance processes or builds.
This agility has empowered the business to act with confidence and at scale. When a new brand is incorporated into the group’s portfolio, the team can launch a new online store for it within three months. With Shopify, the process to build and deploy an online store has become highly streamlined, speeding up delivery time. In fact, in 2025 it took Brand Collective just two months to successfully launch two new portfolio brands in partnership with DotCollective.
Shopify gives Brand Collective the flexibility to move fast and launch sites without getting bogged down in technical complexity. Because the platform is stable and scalable, it supports Brand Collective’s wider brand strategy by making it easier to manage multiple brands in one place while still giving each brand the freedom to evolve. It has been a key part of helping them keep pace with the market and stay ahead of changing customer expectations.
Operationally, Brand Collective has seen a dramatic reduction in their focus on site maintenance and upgrade activities, spending up to 60% less time on these tasks than previously. This lets their engineering focus on net‑new growth levers such as merchandising, while finance reports far lower fraud rates and chargebacks thanks to Shopify Payments’ built-in protections.
However, the broader implications extend beyond operational metrics. Customers are also feeling the difference that Shopify makes. Consistent site reliability has led to better customer experiences and has seen Brand Collective make the most of peak traffic periods such as the BFCM weekend. For instance, during BFCM 2023, the year they transitioned to Shopify, Brand Collective reported record-breaking sales across the board.
The accelerated checkout powered by Shop Pay has trimmed buyer friction, and flexible metaobjects surface rich content that keeps shoppers in‑flow, easing their shopping journeys from one end to the other. These factors have helped to contribute to a 10% year-over-year increase in online sales across the group, higher conversion rates, an enhanced average order value, and a reduction in backend maintenance overheads.
After we relaunched our Champion brand on Shopify, we ran the exact same promotion we’d run just a few months earlier, and saw a 33% lift in conversion rate. On Shopify, the product merchandising was better, the user experience was better, and the checkout was better. We’re now able to bring these benefits to every label in our portfolio with Shopify underpinning our broader brand strategy execution.
