Friends Scott Druce and Matt Harris launched luxury stationery brand Milligram from Druce’s dining room table in 2008. At the time, the brand was purely online, but the tactile nature of Milligram’s products eventually led to the opening of physical stores where customers could explore the range and experience the quality of its products in person.
When Milligram opened its first brick-and-mortar store in 2017, it encountered significant challenges to maintaining the consistency of its online and in-store shopping experiences. To unify its sales channels—and provide online and offline customers with a congruent shopping experience—the brand implemented Shopify POS, and has since enjoyed:
- 32% year-over-year (YoY) increase in FY23 group revenue
- 12% YoY rise in average order value from omnichannel shoppers
- 16% YoY in-store revenue growth
The challenge
To maintain its reputation as a premium brand, Milligram has always avoided discounting and instead took advantage of strategies like a gift with purchase to encourage customers to buy. However, the lack of integration between its separate ecommerce and POS platforms, Adobe Commerce and NetSuite respectively, made it difficult to run these promotions across both in-store and online channels.
In addition, the lack of effective integration between Adobe Commerce and NetSuite prevented Milligram from propelling its loyalty program to the next level. In particular, Milligram wanted a loyalty program that would allow shoppers to collect and redeem points both online and in-store. The brand considered several different loyalty program providers, but the amount of work and expense involved to make its desired loyalty program compatible with NetSuite’s POS solution were too significant to overcome.
The solution
In 2019, Milligram partnered with ecommerce agency Convert Digital to implement Shopify Plus and Shopify POS to handle all selling functions, tapping into Shopify’s extensive integration capabilities to continue using NetSuite’s ERP for back-end functions like accounting and logistics. With its new POS and ecommerce systems working in harmony, Milligram’s marketing team gained newfound confidence that its promotions would work across both online and in-store.
Moving to Shopify POS also empowered Milligram to relaunch its “Friends for Life” loyalty program with Yotpo, granting shoppers the flexibility to collect and redeem points both in-store and online. Importantly, there were no manual integrations required to make Yotpo compatible with Shopify POS—it all worked out of the box.
The results
Switching to Shopify POS meant Milligram could extend online offers to in-store customers and implement omnichannel gift cards, fostering a more cohesive and rewarding shopping experience across all channels. This has contributed to a 16% year-on-year increase in Milligram's in-store revenue.
In addition, Miligram saw a 12% rise in average order value from omnichannel shoppers following the relaunch of its loyalty program to better suit omnichannel shoppers. Overall, the brand has enjoyed a substantial surge in group-wide revenue in the past year.
With seamless integration between its ecommerce platform and in-store POS solution, Milligram now has more time to focus on value-added tasks—like launching new retail stores. The company has doubled the number of retail stores from four to eight since making the switch, and it looks forward to opening more brick-and-mortar stores in the future.
With Shopify POS, Milligram saw results fast:
- 32% YoY increase in FY23 group revenue
- 12% YoY rise in average order value from omnichannel shoppers
- 16% YoY growth in in-store revenue growth
Finding the right POS system to integrate with our ecommerce system and loyalty program has been a big part of our journey improving as a physical retailer.
We run the front end of what we do using Shopify, and we integrate that back into NetSuite. The balance of these two systems means that we don’t need to customise many things.
