Riff Raff sees 20x growth in US sales with expansion store

Some of our best ideas come to us at the least expected moments. For Riff Raff founder Emma Kruger, it was during a bad bout of sickness that had brought down her entire family. Her son had vomited on a precious toy he associated with sleep. It was difficult to wash, so her child was suddenly without his soothing toy and the sick Kruger family was without its sleep. That’s when the idea for Riff Raff Sleep Toys was born: washable, multifunctional sleep toys complete with comforting inbuilt white noise machines.

Challenge

Since 2016, Riff Raff’s Sleep Toys have sold in their thousands, fast becoming one of Australia’s most popular sleep soothers. As the company set its sights on expanding into the US, it knew it needed a completely tailored online experience to address the American consumer mentality.

For starters, with low brand awareness in the region, a United States-targeted website would need to work hard to build trust with its visitors. The brand also wanted to factor in smaller nuances, including simple terminology differences like “safe sleeping CDC recommendations” in the US vs. “SIDS safe” in Australia. 

With a lean team and no physical footprint in the US, Riff Raff wanted a hassle-free solution that would be quick and easy to implement.

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Solution

Having sold through Shopify from day one, Riff Raff saw the migration to Shopify Plus as a natural progression in the brand’s path to international success. With Shopify Plus, multiple websites could be managed through one admin, a massive appeal to the brand if it wanted to have a dedicated US expansion store separate from its Australian one. 

“Launching in the US whilst managing Australia at the same time meant we needed to be super agile and seamlessly switch between storefronts without the hassle of logging out and logging back in,” explains Natalee Buncle, Ecommerce Manager at Riff Raff.

Meanwhile, seamless integrations with apps like help desk provider Gorgias allowed Riff Raff to offer 24/7 customer service cover without drastically ramping up its headcount.

Results

Shopify Plus managed most of the work in its unified backend, making it easy and convenient for Riff Raff staff to transfer products and replicate themes in minutes. This freed up resources to focus on customization. Riff Raff added local pricing, homepage banners, and blog content with ease. Other customizations included the additions of ambassador and expert reviews, and social proof in the form of visual user-generated content (UGC) to build customer trust. The time to launch in the US was halved with the site up and running in a matter of weeks. 

Shopify Flow was a bonus feature that has proved invaluable in automating tasks for inventory management, such as notifying the team when stocks are running low. 

Since the expansion store launch, customer support ticket volumes have increased 10%. But with the ability to manage 3 stores from the same account, Riff Raff’s customer service team has only needed to increase rostering by 5 hours a week, and has dramatically reduced its first time response rate.

Following the success of the US launch, Riff Raff took a “copy and paste” approach in the UK, building and launching an expansion store from scratch in less than a month with no additional resources.

Since moving to Shopify Plus, Riff Raff has seen: