How Manmade grew from 150,000 to over 1 million customers on Shopify

Manmade is a Canadian men's essentials brand co-founded in 2020 by four lifelong friends (Roberto "Berto" Rebelo, Philip Santagata, Robert Marzin, and Anthony Ciavirella) who left careers in finance to build what they couldn't find: a comfortable pair of boxer briefs.

After spending a year developing a single product, the founders launched with 10,000 pairs of black boxer briefs and a marketing strategy built entirely on authenticity and storytelling.

They appeared on CBC's Dragons' Den in 2022, ran Super Bowl ads in 2025, and have since expanded into pants, t-shirts, sweaters, and long johns. Today, Manmade employs close to 100 people and serves customers across Canada and the United States.

After 2.5 years on BigCommerce, Manmade migrated to Shopify Plus. Since then, the brand has scaled from approximately 150,000 customers to over 1 million and is preparing to open its first retail store in Montreal in May 2026.

With Shopify, Manmade has achieved:

• 150,000 to over 1 million customers on the platform
• 17% improvement in checkout completion rate, from 58% on BigCommerce to 68% on Shopify
• 35% of customers checking out with Shop Pay
• Migration completed in under a month by one in-house developer who had never worked on Shopify before
• 2.8-day average order-to-doorstep delivery time across tens of thousands of monthly orders
• First retail store opening in May 2026 in Montreal, powered by Shopify POS

The brand: Four finance careers, one Airbnb, and a black boxer brief

It started in the summer of 2020. The four founders rented an Airbnb in the Laurentians, the countryside north of Montreal, and came up with a hundred different business ideas. Underwear was the one idea that kept sparking the most heated debates. On a hot, humid day back in the city, they noticed they were all adjusting themselves. "Maybe there's something there," Rebelo recalls.

They tested every boxer brief on the market and spent thousands of dollars on competitors’ products. While they found some decent options, none focused purely on function, fit, and comfort without the noise of patterns, gimmicky fabric names, and unnecessary styles.

"We thought it was going to take us three months to get up and running, but it took us a year to get our first prototype ready for market," Rebelo says. The team went through roughly 30 iterations, met with over two dozen manufacturing partners from 10 countries, and finally landed on Modal, a plant-based fabric that is three times softer and more breathable than cotton. The product included one style, one color (black), and five sizes, with nothing else added.

They launched in August 2021 with 10,000 pairs, but the first few months were rough. They averaged four or five orders a day, and the founders began calculating how much time they had before they would need to pull the plug.

Then, on December 8, 2021, a local Montreal newspaper ran a story about four childhood friends on a quest to create the ultimate boxer brief. That day, Manmade sold out completely.

The founders called every one of those first 1,000 customers. They asked every buyer the same question: "Why are you buying underwear from four guys?"

"That’s where we got most of our market research and found our ultimate product-market fit," Rebelo says. Customers kept coming back to the same point. They loved that it was four real people building a brand focused purely on comfort and quality, with no gimmicks.

From that moment, the founders put themselves at the center of everything. Berto filmed 4 organic TikToks a day, personally answered customer questions on socials, and wrote handwritten notes on every order.

That grassroots approach evolved into a Dragons’ Den appearance in fall 2022, Super Bowl ads on CTV, TSN, and RDS in February 2025 and again in 2026, and endorsements from Bryan Adams, Howie Mandel, Kris Letang, and others. The business grew from four or five orders a day to more than a million lifetime customers since the brand’s launch date in 2021.

The Challenge: A checkout that required constant maintenance

Manmade launched on BigCommerce in August 2021. But as the brand grew, the platform became a constraint. The checkout required constant developer maintenance. For a team whose entire competitive advantage was product quality, storytelling, and customer experience, every hour spent on checkout code was an hour not spent on what mattered.

"I was telling the guys, 'This is getting crazy. We can't just keep maintaining the checkout,'" Rebelo says. "'We're not in the app developer, checkout developer business. We're here to sell the best possible quality products with the best service and stellar marketing. If it's not any of those three things, we shouldn't be doing it.'"

The team also struggled with Canada's bilingual market. On BigCommerce, Manmade ran two separate stores (one English, one French) to serve Canadian customers. It was operationally expensive and created fragmentation that a growing brand couldn't afford.

Finding BigCommerce developers was another friction point. Shopify's developer ecosystem was significantly larger, making it easier to hire, get support, and move quickly.

The Solution: A late-night DM to Shopify’s President, Harley Finkelstein

The decision to switch didn't come from a sales deck or an RFP. It came from the founders digging into the numbers.

"One late night, the four of us were sitting around this table and we were looking at Shopify's annual reports," Rebelo says. "We're like, 'Wow, Shopify is really an amazing company.'"

They sent a video DM to Harley Finkelstein, Shopify's president, explaining that they were considering switching from BigCommerce but that it was a big, scary move. Harley responded with a video reply and connected them with the right people at Shopify.

"We thought it was going to take three months to migrate over, but our developer was ready to go live in less than a month," Rebelo says. "It was so much easier than I expected."

Within a month, Manmade had a Shopify Plus agreement in place and a fully built store ready to go live. But the team held the launch until after Q4 to avoid risking a migration during peak season.

"We just wanted to make sure that we were going into a future-proof type of system that we weren't going to have to switch again," Rebelo says. "Shopify was investing in the right places and felt more ahead of its time compared to its competitors."

Manmade adopted Shopify across the business. Shop Pay now accounts for 35% of transactions and has helped improve checkout completion rates, while Shopify Payments serves as the primary processor across both stores.

They have also run Shop App campaigns for nearly two years as a performance-based acquisition channel, which Rebelo describes as a simple, plug-and-play way to reach new customers.

On the operations side, Shopify Flow automatically tags customers by order count and enriches customer and order data. Translate and Adapt allowed the team to consolidate two separate BigCommerce stores into a single bilingual Canadian storefront.

Combined Listings and Bundles support product variations and bundled offers. Sidekick is used across the team for quick data pulls and surface-level insights, often surfacing unexpected trends in real time.

The results: Migration completed by one developer with zero Shopify experience in under a month

The migration was completed entirely in-house by Manmade's developer, who had never worked on Shopify before.

"We thought it was going to take three months to migrate over, but our developer was ready to go live in less than a month," Rebelo says. "'This is so much easier than I expected.'"

The impact of the one-man migration showed up quickly. From checkout conversion to site performance and day-to-day operations, the shift to Shopify Plus improved how the business ran and how customers experienced the brand. Here are the biggest wins:

Checkout completion: 58% to 68%, and 35% Shop Pay adoption

The first metric Rebelo tracked after migration was checkout completion rate. On BigCommerce, 58% of customers who started checkout completed a purchase. On Shopify, that number jumped to 68%, a 17% improvement.

"After we switched from BigCommerce, I saw that it increased by almost 10 points," Rebelo says. "Our checkout completion improved by 17% by switching."

The driver was Shop Pay. Within days of launching, 30% of Manmade's customers were checking out with Shop Pay, a trusted payment method across the Shopify network. That number has since climbed to 35%.

"We were shocked because it meant that all our customers for the last two and a half years had Shop Pay already," Rebelo says. The audience was there. Manmade just hadn't been on the platform that could reach them.

The brand also reinforces trust at the moment of purchase. Its comfort and fit guarantee—where the first pair is replaced for free if sizing is off—helps remove friction for first-time buyers. "We want to make sure everyone gets a chance at getting the right fit in Manmade," Rebelo says, "because we're confident once you do get the right fit, you'll be a customer for life."

What's next: First retail store and beyond

Manmade is opening its first physical retail store in Greater Montreal on May 1, 2026, powered by Shopify POS. The move is driven by data: roughly half of apparel purchases in Canada still happen in person.

The store is designed to remove friction. Every product will be stocked in every size, with dedicated fitting rooms, hospitality touches like coffee and branded water, and trained advisors instead of traditional sales staff. The goal is to create an experience strong enough to drive repeat online purchases.

At the same time, the product line continues to expand, with additional launches planned through 2027 and 2028.

“We went from being the four boxer brief guys a couple years ago, to today being a men’s clothing brand, and aiming in the future to become Canada’s household brand.” Rebelo says. “We want every product to be a category killer.”