When 360&5 was founded in 2013, they defined a clear mission for the agency: to make the world a better designed place. They started off with a focus on branding work, but quickly saw an opportunity to evolve and offer more services, while still serving their mission. More brands needed online stores, and 360&5 determined that Shopify was the best platform to build them on. Over 11 years later, 360&5 is now exclusively a Shopify partner. They’ve grown alongside the platform, adding services like B2B and POS, and moving upmarket to serve enterprise retailers with stores around the world.
“We went all in. We believe in the mission of Shopify," says Andrew Lim, the agency’s co-founder. “Since partnering, we have grown together with Shopify, from servicing smaller brands to now working on very large regional and global brands as well.”
360&5 is not the business of “giving standard answers,” says Andrew. Instead, the Singapore-based design and development agency takes a consultative approach, tackling both front and back end systems to build exceptionally designed, technologically innovative web experiences for their clients—all in-house, and all on Shopify.
As a result of partnering with Shopify, 360&5 has achieved:
- Working with global brands such as Jim Thompson, Steelcase, FrieslandCampina, Universal Music Group, Calecim Professional, and Cortina Watch
- 200% increase in revenue
- 3x growth in revenue for one brand after relaunching DTC and B2B sites
The challenge: Fuel modern commerce for Asia-based brands
For 360&5, engaging large and enterprise businesses in Asian markets comes with its challenges. Often, these companies have legacy systems that they’ve heavily customized, making them resistant to change. They’re also wary of migration costs, given the smaller total addressable market than Europe, Australia, and North America. Together, these factors mean there’s less of a culture to modernize their commerce businesses.
“They’re so used to selling in bulk that they’d rather supply to younger entrepreneurs than to start their own commerce channel,” says Andrew. “It takes a different type of language to get them to consider it.”
Many companies start their ecommerce journey on marketplaces, drawn by the low entry barriers, ease of use, and minimal setup costs. However, we're seeing a growing trend of brands moving toward their own direct-to-consumer (DTC) websites to access richer customer data insights, tailor marketing efforts, and ultimately foster long-term customer relationships.
Since many clients feel constrained by the customized platforms they built on Magento (now Adobe Commerce) and WooCommerce, they come to 360&5 curious about how Shopify might be able to handle the complexity of their businesses. “They’ve started challenging us on what Shopify can do,” says Andrew. “And now we have a lot of these interesting use cases where we helped them achieve their goals.”
By navigating these conversations, 360&5 has found two indicators that businesses are the right fit to take on as clients: they have ambitions to grow internationally, and they have a desire to digitalize. When those goals are aligned, 360&5 can get to work building for them on Shopify.
The solution: Design impactful sites across countries and channels
Early in the partnership, 360&5 offered a variety of services. They did branding, packaging design, web experience building, built pop up stands, you name it. But at that time, Shopify was focused primarily on small businesses. As Shopify’s mission expanded to include larger brands, 360&5 took the opportunity to fully commit.
“We gave up a lot of other services that my entire career was based on, and the reason why we’re so confident in doing that is because of the massive opportunities we see with Shopify."
—Andrew Lim, Co-Founder, 360&5
Now, these large brands are what have made 360&5 such a successful agency.
Build seamless journeys for both DTC and B2B
360&5’s growth has been largely fueled by Shopify’s investment in developing the partnership. At one point, this meant 360&5 was learning how to build Shopify sites for DTC. More recently, it’s been understanding what’s possible for B2B channels given the requirements for more complex ERP, OMS, and CRM systems.
“It’s been quite important to work with Shopify on the solution side of things. The Shopify team can reach internally for additional resources to figure out how these technologies can work together, which helps us progress and win bigger deals.”
—Andrew Lim, Co-Founder, 360&5
One of these clients is Calecim Professional. As a leader in stem cell skincare, Calecim wanted to redesign both their DTC and B2B web experiences to reinforce the brand’s medical research credibility and authority as well as elevate the shopping experience through personalization. On the consumer site, 360&5 updated the pages to include compelling before-and-after visuals, in-depth ingredient details, and profiles of Calecim’s expert medical team. They also added features like a product bundle builder, custom gift add-ons, and a flexible sample selection tool that’s tied to a customer’s cart value.
On the B2B side, 360&5 paid special attention to make it look and feel more like a seamless consumer site. It also offers training sessions, events, and exclusive content for doctors to download. Overall, the relaunch of both stores helped Calecim achieve 3x growth in revenue.
Use design to amplify your brand identity
True to their mission, everything that 360&5 does needs to meet the highest design standard. And when clients are just as passionate as they are, it leads to unique and impactful web experiences. “We work with people who actually want what’s best for their brand,” says Andrew. “Once we finish a project, and we hand it over to them—when they have the pride and the glow of a parent with their baby, that’s when we know we’ve done a good job.”
Take Thirsty Beer Shop. As an online craft beer curator based in Singapore, Thirsty came to 360&5 with the vision that every beer on their site should tell a story. That idea eventually became a refreshed site that’s overflowing with brand identity. “There are no white backgrounds on their product cards,” says Andrew. “Instead, if you click, it’s actually a full width, fully designed image with details that tell you about each of the beers they’ve selected.”
The site has a wide range of product attributes describing the beers’ flavor profiles, alongside quick add-to-cart functionality to accelerate their purchase. Customers can also build a personalized gift box with filters by glassware, types, and flavors that guides customers’ search.
As a win for 360&5, this was the second time Thirsty brought them on for this work. “When they first started, we built their website for them,” says Andrew. “When they came back to us to do the refresh, it was a testament to what we had done. We were able to build that trust.”
Back internationalization efforts with curated web experiences
As 360&5 has grown, they’ve aimed to take on more global brands. And part of that is finding businesses looking to internationalize their commerce efforts.
One of those brands is Cortina Watch. As part of expanding into Malaysia and Thailand, the luxury watch retailer wanted to strategically blend blog content with product pages that would both drive in-store bookings for novice buyers and entice loyal enthusiasts to buy online.
To encourage new shoppers to visit in-store locations, 360&5 built an immersive product listing page that only offers a select range for online purchase. For more dedicated customers, 360&5 restructured the catalog into tailored journeys by brand and category, offering limited-edition products with various watch brands to encourage dedicated customers to keep track of releases.
“Cortina Watch's revamp expanded its brand reach by generating buzz for online exclusives from trusted brands and attracting new international buyers,” says Andrew.
The results: Find growth in untapped markets
Throughout the partnership, Shopify’s support has helped 360&5 grow into a global agency that regularly works with enterprise clients. “The best part of working with Shopify is that they are an amplifier,” says Andrew. “If you see an opportunity in, say, a Southeast Asian country that other Shopify partners have not gone to, you can make the case and grow together with Shopify.” So far, the partnership has led to an incredible 200% increase in revenue.
This is what 360&5 continues to do—they find the opportunities in untapped markets and lean on Shopify’s support to make impactful, beautifully designed commerce experiences for those businesses. And as a Shopify-dedicated agency, 360&5 doesn’t have the hassle of clients’ sites going down in the middle of the night or on weekends.
“In the past, customers would call us at all hours when websites would go down, and it was because they were self-hosted on platforms like WooCommerce or WordPress. Now, we tell customers about Shopify’s 99.99% uptime. As an agency, we no longer have to worry about that.”
—Andrew Lim, Co-Founder, 360&5
And as for what’s next, it’s more of the same—grow 360&5 in more countries and cities, and work alongside Shopify to amplify their voice in those places.
