Last year, Fusion sold 101% of the product it made—every piece it produced, and then some. The Danish endurance sportswear brand has been around since 1999, dressing triathletes and cyclists, including four of the last eight Ironman World Champions. Behind that near-perfect sell-through rate is a company that owns or co-owns nearly its entire supply chain and treats demand forecasting as a science, not a guess.
Eddi Kristensen, Head of E-Commerce, and Jacob Bech, Digital Brand Manager, spoke with Shopify Masters about how Fusion built a manufacturing engine that almost never overproduces. Here’s how the vertical integration, nightly Shopify syncs, AI raw-material forecasting, and discount discipline behind that number all fit together.
On the forecasting problem that turned a distributor into a manufacturer:
Eddi: Fusion started as a distributor; we sold other companies’ products. And what the founders saw was that it’s hard to forecast nine months ahead and get the right goods in the right amount. The forecasting was tough, and you’d be left with stock that couldn’t be sold. That’s pretty much how the idea of starting our own manufacturing brand was founded.
When I joined five years ago as head of ecommerce, it was just after COVID. From 1999 until then it had been a pretty retail-focused brand. We’d gotten on Shopify three or four months before COVID shut down Denmark, so it was easy to start advertising on Meta and pushing people to our own websites.
On what “everything made in Europe” actually means:
Eddi: We have our sewing factory in Lithuania. We own 50% of it, together with another Danish guy who lives in Lithuania and runs the whole thing. We own part of our dyeing factory here in Denmark too, and we have knitting and dyeing facilities we own as well. Then we work with fabric manufacturers throughout Europe to develop the fabrics for triathlon, cycling, and running. Everything is made in Europe.
Jacob: We have our own textile lab in-house, running all the time, with a lot of operators testing our products constantly. We’re very much in demand of the whole supply chain, so we can test, tweak, and do a lot of stuff because we’re in control of the whole thing.
It might seem a bit complex, but it’s actually the opposite. With a lot of other production methods, you have manufacturers overseas, and you’re not entirely sure where each part of the fabric in a jacket actually comes from. We’ve taken everything and integrated it. That’s what sets us apart.
On being product-led, not lifestyle-led—and why a higher price isn’t a downside:
Eddi: What differentiates us from bigger brands like Lululemon is that if they’re lifestyle-led—speaking to a specific lifestyle—we’re more product-led. Everything we do, from marketing to research and development to supply chain, is focused on getting our products out in the most efficient way.
And we see it online: When we get people to buy the first time, they often come back. Quality is something you can market and communicate about, but the real quality, you feel when you wear it. That’s why the 40% repeat rate is there.
Jacob: The outcome is very different when you own production, and the lifetime value of the product is way longer. So is the higher price a downside? I don’t see it that way, because you’re paying for a longer lifespan on the product.
On the discipline behind a 100%-plus sell-through rate:
Eddi: It’s actually 101%; we sold more than we produced last year. The year before, it was 98.9%. Our production and value chain are very effective; we’re good at producing the right amount of product for the right season.
We also sell without giving discounts. We run one sale a year—Black Friday—plus one or two archive sales, but those are only for products or colors that are getting discontinued. Having production and development so close to our headquarters just optimizes the products. Our warranty rate is only 0.2%.
On the system that tells the factory what to sew the next day:
Jacob: To have this sell-through rate, it’s a system we’ve built over the years, very much attached to lean production thinking.
We have a bigger enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that’s integrated with Shopify, so we know everything in our inventory, and it syncs up every night at midnight. We know everything that’s been sold, and the production in Lithuania knows what to sew the next day.
Then we can go one step back, because we also forecast the sourcing of raw materials—that’s the first step in everything. It’s a French partnership, an AI forecasting partner we’ve worked with since before AI was a mainstream word, because it’s all machine learning. They show us when the best time is to invest and buy the raw materials. That gives us a very accurate scope on what we’re going to produce.
On treating complaints as product data, not service tickets:
Eddi: Every review goes into a feedback loop that’s shared with our head of R&D. We value the positive feedback, but also the complaints. A low complaint rate matters because quality should be measurable.
It’s not enough for us to say that we make durable products. We need to see it in the data. We see complaints as a quality signal—so if something fails, it’s not a case for customer service. It’s product data we need to learn from. Quality is something we track, test, and improve, and the feedback we get from customers online is a big part of how we do that.
Hear Eddi and Jacob’s full conversation on Shopify Masters for more on the world’s first apparel-only wind tunnel, why winning athletes become their best word of mouth, and how the EU’s digital product pass is moving their marketing from claims to actual product information.
