Flabelus started in 2020, weeks into the pandemic. Founder Beatriz de los Mozos came to it from law and then legal software sales, with no background in fashion or ecommerce. Her idea was to reinterpret two pieces of European footwear heritage, the Venetian slipper and the Spanish espadrille, for a modern audience. She built the brand on Shopify from day one and started selling online, only in Spain.
From that single market, Flabelus grew revenue more than 200x by 2025. Today the brand runs all 47 retail stores, in every market, on the same system that took its first online order.
“We’ve made all of this growth with all of these stores, and Shopify is at the backstage of things,” says Kacper Stankiewicz, ecommerce senior manager and growth partner at Flabelus. “Shopify helps us not worry about the technical stuff, so we can just think about the brand.”
With Shopify, Flabelus saw results fast:
- More than 200x revenue growth since its first full year online, starting from zero in a single market
- 47 retail stores across 14 countries, with at least 10 more on the way
- Customers in more than 40 countries across Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East
The challenge: global retail growth, small team
Flabelus grew fast, and it grew in every direction at once. Online orders in Spain came first. Then a first physical store in Madrid. Then more stores, more countries, and more currencies. Retail, expansion, and communications all needed to see how their work moved sales.
Expansion also brought edge cases that no off-the-shelf tool handles. Some regions carry their own technical requirements. An airport location, for one, needed a custom setup that default retail software could not deliver. Each new market added currencies and local payment methods to manage. And a team this lean could not afford to spend its days fighting technical blockers instead of building the brand.
The company needed to operate like a much larger business without the overhead of one.
The solution: one platform behind every channel
Flabelus put Shopify at the center of its operations and let it carry the technical weight. Kacper came to the business from a background as a developer, so he knows good software when he sees it. “The fact that we don’t have headaches, that’s a big thing for us.”
The first store set the pattern. Flabelus took over a Madrid location where other brands had tried and failed, and made it work. From day one, that store ran on an iPad with Shopify POS, barcode scanners, and everything needed to sell. “We worried about the business, not about how customers are going to pay or how we’re going to do the stock thing,” says Kacper. When it came time to open the second store, the question was never how to rebuild the system. “We just created a new location, and that’s it. You didn’t even have to think about anything else.” That speed compounds across 47 stores, with supported POS hardware connecting in two clicks rather than through Bluetooth settings, which matters when the team is standing up terminals in the UK, the US, and Spain.
For the requirements no default tool covers, Flabelus builds its own. A team of developers connects custom apps directly to Shopify, so the brand can meet region-specific needs without waiting for a workaround. The airport location is the hardest example, running a custom app paired with a custom Android app that syncs with Shopify. “Without custom apps, we wouldn’t be able to do that,” says Kacper. The same approach turned a repetitive chore into a few clicks. An in-house promotions app now lets the team pick a collection, set the discount, choose a start and end date, and apply the sale across every store and channel automatically. “With custom apps, we can do whatever we want,” Kacper says. “If tomorrow I have some new idea, I can do that.”
It makes everything like Lego pieces. They connect, and they just work. That’s the magic part.
Online and retail run under the same store entity, which gives retail, expansion, and communications one view of how their work moves sales, without stitching reports together from separate systems. That single foundation opens up better customer experiences too. With Reveni handling returns and exchanges, some customers can return or exchange in a local Flabelus store rather than filling out a form online. Kacper uses Sidekick for the questions that come up day to day, typing in plain language and building custom reports for the teams the same way. Matrixify handles the daily imports and exports, and a developer-built sync keeps product translations current across markets.
The result: 200x growth on one system
More than 200x growth since its first full year online, 47 stores, and customers in more than 40 countries all run on the foundation Flabelus started with. Flabelus never replatformed.
What the platform is worth to Flabelus shows up in what the team no longer has to think about. Hardware that connects on its own. Analytics in one place. Integrations that hold. “We think about our business, and not about the constant technical stoppers,” Kacper says. “That’s a big thing that people take for granted.”
My metric is how the internal team uses Shopify to make our life easier.
That freedom is what Beatriz needed to build a brand across 14 countries. Now the team is planning the next stage: at least 10 more stores, several custom app developments already in progress, and multiple warehouses serving the online store, managed with Shopify’s multi-entity capability rather than a more complicated setup. On payments, the same principle holds across every currency and local method the brand supports. “It just works,” Kacper says. “That’s how much I can say.”
