Scabal has sold premium menswear and womenswear from two stores in Bergen, Norway, since 1982. Alexander Ingebrigtsen runs the business today, the third generation of his family to do so, after his grandfather founded it and his father expanded it. When Scabal built a new site on Shopify in early 2021, the goal was modest: give local customers a digital showroom that showed what was actually in stock. The first year exceeded that target, selling more than four times as much, and growth has kept compounding every year since.
- Sold €450,000 in its first year online, more than four times its original €100,000 target.
- Grew online sales 40% year over year in its most recent year.
- Now staffs its ecommerce team 50/50 with fashion and technical specialists, up from a team with no technical hires at all.
The challenge: a marketplace platform that undercut the brand
Before Shopify, Scabal sold through Miinto, a Nordic fashion marketplace that lists boutiques' in-stock goods and takes a cut of every sale. It worked, in the sense that orders came in, but Miinto took a large share of the margin and directed customer attention toward its own platform rather than toward Scabal. The company also tried a custom-built website from a local developer, which left it troubleshooting technical problems instead of selling clothes, and lost money in the process.
Neither option let Scabal own its own customer relationship or its own margin. "What we were keen to do was build Scabal's brand, and not feed some other platform," said Alexander Ingebrigtsen, Scabal's CEO.
By the end of 2020, Scabal needed a platform it could run itself, one built around its own storefront and its own stock, not someone else's marketplace.
The solution: a POS-synced storefront built with Appsalon
Alexander partnered with Andreas Totland at Appsalon, a Shopify Plus agency, to build a new Scabal storefront in late 2020. Shopify's open API meant the new site synced instantly with the point-of-sale systems running in both physical stores. What used to require manual reconciliation happened automatically.
Scabal launched the new site on March 15, 2021, just before Bergen entered a fresh round of COVID restrictions that shut physical retail again. The website became the only way customers could reach the store, and new hires picked up the platform quickly enough to keep pace with the sudden shift online.
It would normally have taken us two or three years to get where we did in just half a year, because we had to speed up our modernization almost overnight
Scabal now runs sales reporting and seasonal demand forecasting through Shopify Sidekick, Shopify's built-in AI agent, and Appsalon has started training Scabal's staff to use it more widely heading into the next buying season. Andreas Totland, of Appsalon, described the approach as building "with a Shopify-first mentality," with commerce, loyalty, and CRM all centered on the platform.
The result: physical stores growing alongside online sales
Scabal's online sales have kept climbing since that first year. Orders are up 240% and sales 350% since 2021, including 40% year-over-year growth in the most recent year alone. The team that runs the site has grown to match, now split evenly between staff hired for their fashion background and staff hired for their technical skills, working from the same product knowledge on both sides.
Sky is the limit for us. We don't have a target, we just follow.
The growth changed Scabal's expansion plans. Five years ago, opening new stores was the default way to grow. Now, with two stores in Bergen generating strong online sales alongside steady in-store growth, Alexander sees scaling the website as the faster path. The online store made up just 1% of Scabal's total business in 2020. By 2026, that share had grown to approximately 23%, and Alexander hopes to reach 30% in 2027. Klarna handles roughly 70% of checkout volume, Alexander estimates, and Scabal moved to Shopify Payments seven months ago.
Growth has brought a new problem: order volumes have outpaced the storage space inside Scabal's two physical stores, which were built to hold a season's stock, not to fulfill daily online orders too. Scabal is now evaluating third-party logistics providers and dedicated storage to keep up. "We can do an investment and wait five years for it to pay off," Alexander said, describing the patience that comes with running a family business with no board demanding short-term returns, the same patience that let a fashion-first team learn to run a Shopify storefront in the first place.