SaturdayClub accelerates global growth with expansion stores

Headquartered in Singapore, SaturdayClub is a fashion retailer that aims to strike the perfect balance between style and ease, bringing chic designs to modern muses with their curated mix of versatile staples, wardrobe essentials and statement pieces that are current and timeless.

Starting out as a dedicated business-to-business (B2B) brand, SaturdayClub has evolved over more than two decades to build a major retail business with an online presence that stretches to countries such as Malaysia, Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

As SaturdayClub expanded into global markets to drive growth, the demands of deploying and maintaining websites in other countries using their former ecommerce platform, Adobe Commerce, became overwhelming in terms of time, money, and resources. With Shopify Plus, SaturdayClub has slashed their time and cost to launch in new markets, driving rapid growth.

With Shopify Plus, SaturdayClub has seen:

The challenge: International expansion hampered by time and cost

With a mandate to grow into markets beyond their home country of Singapore, SaturdayClub had expanded their online operations to a number of other countries using their previous ecommerce platform, Adobe Commerce, with some markets served by PrestaShop. But every country launch was accompanied by a lead time of a month or more and a hefty price tag, sometimes in excess of SG$10,000 for those markets served by the Adobe Commerce platform.

The time and resources needed to replicate and migrate data for each new store, along with rectifying bugs and complications arising from problematic integrations with other back-office infrastructure, made SaturdayClub’s international expansion trajectory slower and more expensive than it needed to be.

Moreover, the cloud services used to host the ecommerce platform frequently struggled to keep pace with spikes in demand, for instance during the Lunar New Year sales, without manual intervention. This meant that SaturdayClub’s website team needed to anticipate potential surges and enable additional cloud capacity or risk potential downtime and loss of sales.

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The solution: One dashboard to rule them all

On the advice of its agency partner Verz Design, SaturdayClub implemented Shopify Plus in late 2023. Working with Verz Design, the brand used the Shopify Plus expansion store feature and its site duplication capabilities to launch four international stores in less than five months. The unified back-end means SaturdayClub can keep track of their new international sites from a single dashboard.

Meanwhile, SaturdayClub used the Shopify Plus Checkout Extensibility feature to easily implement new, additional third party payment gateway solutions to give customers in different international markets greater choice when buying items from the brand. This choice of payment option has been particularly important in markets such as Malaysia, where sales have surged.

Additionally, SaturdayClub leveraged the Shopify application programming interface (API) to integrate their new stores with their back-end systems, enabling a bug-free migration and expansion. The scalability of Shopify Plus, being a cloud-native solution, has also enabled SaturdayClub to handle peak traffic automatically, ensuring no loss of sales at busy times.

The result: Expansion goals met with rapid growth

Since implementing Shopify Plus, SaturdayClub has accelerated their expansion goals, successfully migrating and replacing their stores in Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Japan. They have also opened up seven new markets by scaling up their online presence in countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, and South Korea with an international expansion store.

As SaturdayClub builds their international presence, they no longer have to worry about losing customers due to website downtime, with Shopify Plus able to handle traffic spikes and peak sales surges, leading to revenue growth. For instance, the brand’s Malaysian business recorded its strongest monthly sales to date during the 2024 Lunar New Year holiday season, with that market growing by 38% YoY — an increase helped along by multiple payment gateway options.

SaturdayClub’s ability to launch a new online presence in so many markets within such a short space of time has directly impacted their ability to drive customer growth, with the brand seeing a consistent 5% month-on-month increase in customers since implementing Shopify Plus.

Now, SaturdayClub plans to leverage B2B on Shopify for an online wholesale store to sell to retailers in countries where it’s difficult to connect with consumers directly. The brand is also exploring brick and mortar retail possibilities with Shopify POS.

With Shopify Plus, SaturdayClub saw results fast: