From Shopware 5 to Shopify Plus in 3 months

Dutch brand SNURK wanted a plug & play platform to sell their cheerfully printed bed linen and homewear on - but found out Shopware 5 only covered the basics. After their migration to Shopify Plus, they saw their BFCM turnover grow by 25%.

CLIENT

SNURK

INDUSTRY

Lifestyle, Home

TECHNOLOGY

Shopify plus webshops

PACKAGE

Webshop migration

Services we provided

Migration

Store Development

E-Commerce Optimization

UX/UI Design

Email Marketing

Internationalization

B2B

How a cardboard box can lead to 2,5 million online GMV yearly

Once upon a time, Peggy van Neer and her husband wanted to help the homeless by selling a duvet cover that had a print of a cardboard box on it. To promote their idea, they installed themselves on the Dam in Amsterdam under the duvet cover - and quickly drew the attention of both the local police and a camera crew. What followed was a lot of media attention, a sold-out duvet cover, and the establishment of the bedding brand SNURK. Sixteen years later the cardboard box cover keeps raising money for the homeless, with donations now heading towards €100.000 in total.

In the meantime, in addition to selling wholesale, SNURK grew its D2C sales to €2,5 million GMV a year and started selling in 8+ countries. Initially through a self-built online store, then on Shopware 5, and since October 2023 on Shopify Plus. Founder Peggy is happy with the switch: “We just had a very successful BFCM. 25% more sales than the last three years on Shopware, and without any crashes!”

→ Check out five reasons why Shopify is your best bet, too…

Shopware lock-in

Their store crashing during BFCM was only one of the issues SNURK had while on Shopware 5. Peggy: “When we moved to Shopware 5, we came from a self-built store. Back then I wanted a platform because I thought it would be plug & play. But it turned out Shopware only covered the basics, and we still had to do a lot of work ourselves. That was a bit of a deception.”

Cost was also an issue. “I thought Shopware would be quite affordable, but when we added it all up it was a lot more expensive than it seemed at first. We needed apps for everything, which all charged a fee of course. We also struggled with server capacity: we were told that we needed a more powerful, more expensive server, which we got - and then the site still went down. No matter how much money we threw at it, it didn’t work.”

→ Get insight into the costs of a Shopify online store for your brand. Use our TCO calculator for a personalized calculation, including Shopify fees, Apps and (ongoing) store development.

A third issue was Shopware’s relatively small ecosystem. “There aren’t that many Shopware agencies in the Netherlands, and when they’re busy you’re not being serviced. When you reach out to the Shopware headquarters in Germany about this, they usually just refer you back to your agency. Sometimes it felt like resellers had priority over clients.”

When the EOL for Shopware 5 was announced, Peggy took the opportunity to look at other platforms. “I had my eye on Shopify already, because that kind of efficiency and user friendliness was what I had been looking for all along. Also, our Shopware experience taught us that we shouldn’t go for what looked like the cheapest option, because you get what you pay for.”

International success with Shopify Markets

Luckily SNURK was able to migrate to Shopify Plus within three months, with a little help from Code. SNURK opted for a single store set-up that services both the Dutch-speaking market, where 80% of SNURK’s sales are made, and the rest of the world (Germany and the US chief among them) through Shopify Markets. This set-up is a good fit for their relatively small team.

Code made good use of the latest Shopify Markets features to achieve this. Peggy: “With Markets we could easily upload all our SKUs and couple them to a specific market. This is important for us, because the sizing for bed linen differs considerably between countries. In the Netherlands a standard pillowcase is 60x70cm, for instance, while in Germany it’s 80x80cm and it closes with a zipper. Hence, we have different-sized versions of practically every item in that category.”

Working with Code

Peggy is very positive about SNURK’s collaboration with Code. “We’ve been online for over 15 years, but our IT partners never felt very professional - until now. Code was a breath of fresh air for us. [Project Manager] Marloes took us by the hand and guided us through the whole thing: this is how we’re going to do the project; now we need your help tackling this; now we need feedback on this from you. We needed that, since we don’t have a large team. We were also very eager to do our bit in time, because we absolutely wanted to keep within the tight deadline.”

Code’s professionalism already caught Peggy’s attention when SNURK was looking for an agency to do the migration with. “We received proposals from several agencies, and Code’s proposal stood out because it was so thoughtful and complete. They take a really broad view, not just what your store will need to launch, but also what happens after. I felt that was something our small team could benefit from, a partnership that SNURK would thrive in.”

→ Curious to know what Code can do for your store after launch? Check out our E-commerce Growth service here.

BFCM with flying colours

The new SNURK site was launched mid-October 2023, in time to smooth out any last hiccups before BFCM. For the first time in three years, the site didn’t crash when SNURK gave their VIP customers early access to Black Friday deals - which resulted in a 25% higher turnover. Peggy: “That also drove home to us how much revenue we’ve been missing because of the server crashing all the time.”

Future plans: a loyalty program and Klaviyo

Now that SNURK is on Shopify, what are Peggy’s ambitions for the store? Peggy: ”I would love to start a loyalty program. We have a lot of repeat customers that have been with us for a long time, true brand ambassadors. They came for the cheerful prints, and then they stayed for the high quality of our products and our service.”

Another way of connecting with SNURK’s fans is email marketing with Klaviyo, which they started using recently. “The coming months we plan to launch a few more Klaviyo flows, together with Code. We already improved our existing flows, since our revenue from email marketing has always been quite high. It’s around 25% now.” She’s also considering implementing a tool for upselling and cross-selling.

→ Interested in Code’s Klaviyo expertise? Read more about it here

In all, Peggy is very happy with SNURK’s move to Shopify. “Our e-commerce manager once compared Shopify to Apple, and all other platforms to Android. It’s a closed system, but everything that is on offer within that system simply works.” At Code, we couldn’t agree more!