Baskèts is a Dutch multi-brand retailer selling sneakers and clothing from 90 brands across two stores, a café, and an online store. For years it ran alongside a sister business, Freshcotton, an online-only clothing platform carrying the same brands, the same products, and largely the same customers. The two shared almost everything except a technology stack. Baskèts sold in-store and online using Lightspeed, while Freshcotton sold online using Shopware.
Working with Flatline Agency, Baskèts moved both businesses to Shopify two weeks apart, then used the platform itself to fold Freshcotton into the Baskèts brand. Today the company runs its stores and its online business from one place, and its team builds its own tools on top of it.
The challenge: two platforms and a fragile checkout
Baskèts began on the shop floor. Freshcotton grew online. The overlap between them was close to total, and the team calculated that Baskèts could capture around 90% of Freshcotton's revenue on its own. Merging the two made obvious commercial sense. The technology was what made it hard.
On Shopware, the connections wired into the back end were tight enough that routine work carried real risk. Changing a product image could take down the buy button.
Several issues could break the checkout, each with a different cause and solution. Sometimes, simply changing something on a product was enough to stop customers from completing a purchase.
That meant working evenings and weekends. Thijs remembers one Friday afternoon when a checkout issue kept the team working until Saturday morning to resolve it.
Getting a product live was its own job. Baskèts takes on roughly 2,000 SKUs per season, four to five thousand a year, and each of its 90 brands sends data its own way. One brand calls a field a title, another calls it a name. One sends a SKU, another sends a number. Every season, that had to be reconciled by hand before anything could be sold.
The solution: one platform, two brands, custom tools
Baskèts' integration, growth, AI and strategic partner, Flatline Agency, migrated Baskèts first and Freshcotton two weeks later. Rather than rebuild twice, the team copied the Baskèts theme across to Freshcotton and changed only the logo. Freshcotton customers met the new experience months before the brands formally combined, and recognized the store when they did.
We really used Shopify as a tool to merge our two concepts.
In January, Baskèts moved in-store payments onto Shopify POS. Before that, staff rang a sale on one system and typed the amount into a separate payment terminal by hand, so every transaction depended on somebody keying in the right figure. Finance then spent time each month reconciling payments against POS orders, and a single typo broke the match. Now the amount goes to the terminal from the order itself.
The team also began building its own tools. Baskèts runs an unusual mix of retail, ecommerce, and brand partnerships, and off-the-shelf apps consistently got close without quite fitting. Thijs built an app that manages markdowns and sell-through, with the brand agreements written in as rules, so a brand contracted never to exceed 30% off never does. The buyer built one that sends sell-through reports out automatically. The logistics lead built tools for the warehouse.
"Everyone is using it. I'm building apps to help the commercial part. Our buyer is building apps to really help him in sell-through reports," says Thijs.
The result: zero downtime and a smaller team
Since migrating, Baskèts has recorded no downtime. The Friday night calls stopped. Products go live faster despite a catalog that turns over several thousand SKUs a year, and the team no longer treats a back-end change as something that might break the store.
The payment workflow closed a gap between the shop floor and finance that had been open for years.
I never saw something as seamless as this. I think it's state-of-the-art administration.
The ecommerce team went from three people to one. Thijs estimates that Shopify, the custom apps, and AI tooling together freed up the equivalent of three to four full-time roles, two of them from ecommerce. The team also uses AI-generated visuals to present products rather than shooting everything itself.
That capacity is going into stores. Baskèts is opening a 300 square meter store at Schiphol Airport, its largest yet, and expects the balance of the business to keep shifting toward the shop floor.
"If it's not on Shopify, I'm not doing it," says Thijs.