Olivia & Kate began as a 53-square-metre boutique in Haarlem and now sells across the Netherlands online and in store. With Shopify POS, Sidekick, and support from Flatline Agency, its three-person ecommerce team runs the data, campaigns, and automation behind that growth.
With Shopify, Olivia & Kate has:
- Nearly tripled revenue over the past year
- Approximately 11% of payments now made through Shop Pay, with adoption continuing to grow
- Approximately €1,200 in development costs avoided by building a returns workflow with Sidekick
The challenge: Turning rapid growth into a scalable operating model
Janina Pakasi opened the boutique in 2017. Six months later, after customers began asking to shop online, she launched a web store, built on Shopify from the start. Ecommerce accelerated when the boutique closed temporarily during the pandemic, but growth later reached a plateau.
When Steffen Boskma, Co-owner at Olivia & Kate, joined the business two years ago to lead growth, data, and performance marketing, he found a strong creative brand that could make better use of its commerce data. Janina led the creative side, from product to campaigns, and the data and performance side needed an owner.
The online store ran on Shopify, but the physical boutique used a separate point-of-sale platform. Customer and transaction data lived in different places, which made it harder to build a complete view of the customer across retail and ecommerce. Reporting was manual too. Answering a question about customer lifetime value, campaign performance, discounts, or returns could mean building a full report and working out where to find the right data.
Before Sidekick, understanding lifetime value meant building a report, and sometimes I did not know where to look. Now I can ask the question, refine which customers to include, and keep digging into the data through the follow-up questions Sidekick suggests.
The pressure grew as the business did. Olivia & Kate now employs around 30 people, but only three work specifically on ecommerce. That small team needed to convert fast revenue growth into a stable operating model without adding unnecessary cost or routing every operational question to an external developer.
The solution: One commerce platform with Flatline Agency and Sidekick
Olivia & Kate brought its physical boutique onto Shopify POS during a store renovation in April 2025, uniting retail and ecommerce data in one platform.
That unified view gave the team a stronger base for understanding how customers shop across channels. The brand also implemented Klaviyo to build customer segments, reward its strongest customers, and create recovery flows for customers at risk of dropping off.
In August 2025, Olivia & Kate began working with Flatline Agency. Flatline supports the brand’s ecommerce strategy, conversion rate optimisation, and automation roadmap, helping the team identify best practices and make fuller use of Shopify’s capabilities.
Together, the two focus on a clear objective: reduce operating costs while protecting revenue, and build a model that can carry the next stage of growth.
The team turns commerce data into answers with Sidekick
Sidekick became central to how Olivia & Kate’s ecommerce team works with data and operations. The team uses it to calculate customer lifetime value, assess advertising efficiency, analyse recent customer cohorts, monitor promotions and returns, and turn business rules into Shopify workflows. Instead of starting with a manual report or a development brief, the team starts with a question in plain language and refines the answer from there.
Steffen uses Sidekick to calculate customer lifetime value and assess the efficiency of advertising spend. Because the brand has grown quickly, he can exclude older customer cohorts and focus on more recent behaviour, so the team decides with data that better reflects the current business.
Sidekick also helps the team monitor campaigns and promotions in real time. What once required a full report can now begin with a simple question about current performance and how it compares with the previous day.
Before, it was a whole report. Now it is a question: how is the promotion going today, and how does that compare with yesterday? We get more information and can make better decisions next time.
Sidekick is not limited to one person. The three-person ecommerce team uses it, and customer service colleagues bring questions that the tool can often answer directly. Steffen encourages colleagues to self-serve rather than route every request through him.
From an expensive development quote to a live workflow
Olivia & Kate’s most tangible Sidekick use case began with one of fashion ecommerce’s hardest operational challenges: returns.
Return rates run high across women’s fashion, so the team wanted to stop customers with consistently high return rates from using a deferred payment option. The developer then building the website offered to create the workflow but quoted approximately €1,200, so Steffen held off and looked for a more efficient route.
When Sidekick’s workflow-building capabilities became available, Steffen described the business rule and expected help defining the steps for a developer. Instead, Sidekick offered to build the flow directly. The workflow went live and gave the team a practical way to act on returns data without commissioning the external build.
I asked Sidekick whether the flow was possible. It asked, ‘Shall I build it for you?’ I said yes, and then it was online. That was the moment I thought: this is going to help our business grow.
For Olivia & Kate, this is the broader value of Sidekick. It does not only surface information; it helps a small team turn an operational idea into action inside Shopify.
Connecting online and retail through Shopify POS
Bringing the physical boutique onto Shopify POS gave Olivia & Kate one database across retail and ecommerce. That makes it easier to understand its highest-value customers, create more relevant segments, and connect activity across the customer journey.
The unified setup also supports a broader ecosystem around Shopify. Olivia & Kate connects its store to Klaviyo, its fulfilment partner, payment providers, and other tools without building a custom commerce stack.
That flexibility helped the brand scale without bringing fulfilment in-house or rapidly increasing headcount. As order volume grew, the fulfilment partner absorbed the operational demand through a straightforward Shopify connection.
Making checkout faster with Shop Pay
Olivia & Kate uses a mix of Shopify Payments and local payment services to meet the needs of customers in the Netherlands. Shop Pay has become an increasingly important part of that mix, because returning customers can complete checkout with their saved information.
Shop Pay is something we want to offer because it gives the customer a one-click experience with everything already set. The percentage of customers using it has grown steadily.
Approximately 11% of Olivia & Kate’s payments are made through Shop Pay, and adoption continues to grow.
The result: Nearly three times the revenue
According to Flatline Agency, Olivia & Kate nearly tripled revenue over the past year.
The next phase is not growth at any cost. Olivia & Kate and Flatline are building the organisation, automation, and operating discipline to make that growth stable. Shopify provides the commerce foundation, while Sidekick gives the team faster access to data and a practical way to automate work that once required manual reporting or external development.
The brand nearly tripled in a year, which is unusual in this region. The next challenge is getting the organisation ready to scale even further while keeping that foundation stable.
The platform also supports the brand’s international roadmap. Olivia & Kate plans to expand from the Netherlands into Dutch-speaking Belgium within the coming months, and Germany could follow if the Belgium launch goes well. The team expects fulfilment, returns, and local execution to need careful planning, but it does not see the commerce platform as the constraint.
For Steffen, Shopify’s value lies in a strong search foundation and the range of solutions available as the business evolves.
I recommend Shopify a lot. It is a smooth platform, and for every problem there is a solution. The development is ongoing, and the new rollouts keep bringing us fresh possibilities.
