WOW Concept is a multi-brand retailer that reads more like a discovery platform than a department store. Founded in Madrid roughly five years ago, it hunts for the newest, mostly digital-first brands and gives them a physical stage: prime buildings of 3,000 to 8,000 square meters, five floors, food halls up top, and a curated edit of 300 to 400 brands on the floor at any time. The stores act as billboards. The online store carries the depth.
The catch was the technology underneath. WOW was born digital, but it ran on retail software built for the opposite kind of business. After moving to Shopify for online, point of sale, and payments, WOW stopped managing two separate businesses and started managing one.
Since replatforming, WOW Concept has:
- Doubled its online conversion rate, from approximately 1% to 2%
- Grown email capture from close to 0 to 1% of traffic to roughly 30%
- Increased orders from repeat customers by 356% year over year, driven by its WOW Universe loyalty program
The challenge: One brand, two disconnected businesses
Before Shopify, WOW ran on Retail Pro for the store and Adyen for payments. The setup worked for large, physical-first retailers. It did not work for a company that wanted to grow the other way around, from a digital base outward.
Every change was a project. New store features, accepting online returns in store, small workflow tweaks, all of it required custom development that took months to ship. The result was a disjointed business, and a missed opportunity.
"Before, we used Retail Pro. It was a great system, but definitely not a good fit for our strategic plan," said Dimas Gimeno, Founder at WOW Concept. "We did not want to adapt legacy systems to the digital age. We aimed to build from a digital reality to lead what comes next, and Shopify was the answer."
Payments sat in the same bucket. Adyen was solid and secure, but it lived outside the commerce platform, which meant extra work on security and reconciling data across systems.
The solution: One platform for online, store, and payments
Moving to Shopify brought the two businesses together as one. WOW stopped thinking in terms of online sales and store sales. Now there is one kind of sale, and it belongs to WOW.
We don't talk about online sales or store sales. We talk about WOW sales
"In Shopify, an order is an order, whether it starts online or in the store," said Julián Lázaro, Chief Commercial Officer at WOW Concept. "It's called an order no matter where it comes from. Shopify is omnichannel natively." That single view of orders, inventory, and customers is what changed day-to-day operations. A customer can buy online and return in store. An associate can sell a size that isn't on the floor, find it online, and set up a click and collect on the spot. "This unified information is what makes us strong today," Julián said.
Payments moved inside the same system. WOW replaced Adyen with Shopify Payments, less because Adyen fell short and more because the whole point was to run one connected ecosystem instead of stitching tools together. "The good thing about Shopify is having the complete ecosystem," Julián said. "Having Shopify Payments inside Shopify solved the whole thing, no added security or data reconciliation problems." Turning it on took, in his words, two clicks.
On top of that unified base, WOW layered a loyalty program, WOW Universe, that links a customer's full order history across online and store. The team built and launched it in two months. WOW also added a payment method for desktop checkout and plans to grow into new markets, where Shopify Payments and multi-currency, multi-entity support will carry the expansion into cities like Paris, London, and New York.
The result: Conversion doubled, and returns stayed flat while sales climbed
The clearest number is conversion. On the web, WOW roughly doubled its conversion rate, from close to 1% to 2%, with gains across the funnel from product listing pages through checkout. "The conversion rate went from around 1 to 2, and we're very proud of that," said Sylvie Degrange, Chief Digital and Omnichannel Officer at WOW Concept.
Managing online and store separately is a nightmare. With both together, you think WOW sales, and that's a radical change.
Growth followed on both sides of the business. Physical sales rose 35% year over year. Online sales grew 75 to 80% in the first half of 2026 against the first half of 2025. And because online and store now share one stock and customer record, the growth did not drag a wave of problems behind it: cancellations and returns rose only 20% while total sales value grew about 80%.
The loyalty program compounded the effect. By capturing roughly 30% of store and site traffic as known customers, up from almost nothing, WOW gave its teams a reason and a way to bring shoppers back. Orders from repeat customers climbed 356% year over year and 168% quarter over quarter. "I'd tell anyone to do it," Sylvie said of running one platform across stores.