Lola’s Cupcakes grew its loyalty program by over 10,000 with Shopify Plus
Previous Platform
Custom, Adobe Commerce
Industry
Food and beverage
Use Case
Apps and integrations, Data Integration and CRM, Retail and POS, Multi-channel and omnichannel
Product
Shopify Plus, Shopify POS
Introduction
Born in 2006 when two friends, Victoria Jossel and Romy Lewis, turned baking into a business, Lola’s Cupcakes is now found in over 30 locations across the UK.
Since adopting Shopify the brand has seen:
- Over 10,000 new customers in its loyalty scheme, Lola’s Love Club
- More than 1 million purchases made using Shopify POS in less than a year
- Full integration with their diverse range of third-party tools
- Automated and reliable performance reporting
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Challenge
Lola’s Cupcakes has two sides to their business: online and retail. Both were previously run on custom-built tools systems leveraging a diverse range of third-party applications. The team needed a central platform that could support their CMS, integrating with their extensive list of tools and plugins. The platform would also need to be flexible enough to allow for further development, online/offline unification, and expansion.
“Running a cake business is very different to, say, selling t-shirts, where product lines can be dispatched whenever. It’s highly specific. Our products need to arrive at an exact time and date, and are bespoke.
We tried using Adobe Commerce, but even after significant investment, our development agency informed us that the experience would be less effective than the previous solution.
- Lola’s Cupcakes
- Asher Budwig — Managing Director
With the launch of their loyalty program, Lola’s Love Club, the retail team was also looking for a point of sale (POS) solution that would marry with the brand’s loyalty program provider smile.io. Customers needed to be able to redeem loyalty points for in-store purchases, and store staff needed the ability to access and leverage customer account data in an instant. Lola’s previous system didn’t allow for such an integration, presenting challenges not only with smile.io but with the team’s wider marketing application library, such as Mailchimp and Campaign Mailer.
Lastly, operating in over 30 locations across the UK, Lola’s retail teams had to repeatedly generate and piece together countless sales and performance reports. They wanted a system that would provide a faster and firmer grasp on their numbers.
The team knew it was time for an upgrade.
Solution
Lola’s Cupcakes learned of Shopify through a referral from another retailer and began taking steps to replatform their tech stack, managed by the in-house team from 2020. They then started Shopify POS to provide the retail experience and functionality the team were looking for in 2023. They were able to add customer data natively through Shopify which worked in lock-step with smile.io, automatically creating loyalty accounts and managing the customer wallets, allowing customers to spend loyalty points in store.
What’s more, it all integrated seamlessly with the team’s marketing solutions, ensuring the brand could add consenting customers to their marketing and mailing lists. “The ability to add a customer to a process or search the customer database in store to find things like previous orders is something I would not walk away from,” says Asher.
To unify online and retail, Lola’s Cupcakes built centralised product databases with Shopify, providing unilateral, single sources of truth for their physical sites. These go beyond just standard stalls and stores, with two new cake vending machines dynamically drawing the relevant images and product information using Shopify.
The team have also been impressed with how easy Shopify is to use thanks to its various low and no-code solutions.
As an operator and an owner, I now have the ability to make changes to the way the business functions digitally behind the scenes. It’s comforting to feel more in control of operations and not have this huge sea between us and development.
- Lola’s Cupcakes
- Asher Budwig — Managing Director
In addition to cupcakes, Lola’s operates a solar panel installation business that also runs on Shopify. “I was able to set up the solar company (www.nextdaysolar.co.uk) with little-to-no help,” says Asher. “That gave me the confidence to say to the team, Shopify offers an out-of-the-box product that pretty much anybody can use. The key driver is its simplicity and ease of setup. We should use it.”
Results
Lola’s adoption of Shopify has seen Lola’s Love Club go from strength to strength, with over 10,000 new customers added to the scheme.
The company recently celebrated its one-millionth order placed via Shopify POS in less than a year, with ambitions to explore the wider library of Shopify solutions to support its business.
Shopify opens up opportunities to do things that you otherwise wouldn’t have been able to think of or do before. For me, that’s its key speciality.
- Lola’s Cupcakes
- Asher Budwig — Managing Director
And the team has also taken full advantage of Shopify’s reporting capabilities. “Shopify is a phenomenal reporting engine,” says Asher. “Using the Shopify platform we are able to get whatever report we want, whenever we want, however we want. And you can automate it all which has driven excellent efficiencies.”
Despite these already marked successes, Lola’s Cupcakes continues to expand its usage of Shopify’s full complement of solutions. The brand is about to enter its next phase of its online strategy, with its main website in the process of replatforming to Shopify imminently as it continues on its journey of omnichannel success.