Lola’s Cupcakes grew its loyalty program by over 10,000 with Shopify

In 2006 when two friends, Victoria Jossel and Romy Lewis, turned their passion for baking into a business and founded Lola’s Cupcakes. Almost two decades later, the company is now found in over 40 locations across the UK, in the form of retail stores and collection lockers for click and collect purchases. As one of the first brands to start selling cupcakes online in 2011, they have over 12 years’ experience specialising in ecommerce. But with their previous custom system, they struggled to deliver a unified experience for their customers, including a loyalty scheme that could seamlessly work online and in-store.

Since adopting Shopify, the brand has seen:

• Total cost of ownership of the site reduced by over 50%
• More than 1 million purchases made using Shopify POS in less than a year
• Over 10,000 new customers join its loyalty scheme, Lola’s Love Club

Challenge

Lola’s Cupcakes is selling baked goods online and in physical stores. Both channels were previously run on systems with custom-built tools leveraging a diverse range of third-party applications, which added a lot of complexity and slowed Lola’s Cupcakes down. The team needed one central platform that could support their CMS, integrating with existing applications. The platform would also need to be flexible enough to allow for further development, online/offline unification, and expansion, all while ensuring the team were following all the legal guidelines associated with a food business.

With the launch of their loyalty program, Lola’s Love Club, the retail team was also looking for a point of sale (POS) solution that would integrate with the brand’s loyalty program provider smile.io. The goal was to give customers the ability to redeem loyalty points for in-store purchases- Store staff would need the ability to access and leverage customer account data in an instant. Lola’s Cupcakes previous system didn’t support this integration, presenting challenges not only with smile.io but with services in the team’s wider tech stack, such as Mailchimp and Campaign Mailer.

Lastly, with a footprint in dozens of locations across the UK, Lola’sCupcakes retail teams had to repeatedly generate and piece together countless sales and performance reports. They were looking for centralised reporting and a system that would provide ad hoc transparency over their numbers, giving them the opportunity to make important decisions quickly if needed.

Solution

Lola’s Cupcakes learned of Shopify through a referral from another retailer and began replatforming their online and offline tech stack in 2019. Implementing Shopify POS in one store went so smoothly that the company quickly added additional stores and rolled out the new technology in a very short time across its brick and mortar stores in the UK . At the same time, Lola’s Cupcakes were able to add customer data natively through Shopify which worked in lock-step with smile.io, automatically creating loyalty accounts and managing the customer wallets. That gave customers the ability to spend loyalty points in store, and very quickly provided Lola’s Cupcakes with the seamless customer experience they were looking for.

What’s more, the platform integrates with the team’s marketing solutions, ensuring the brand could add consenting customers to their marketing and mailing lists. “The ability to add a customer to a process or search the customer database in store to find things like previous orders is something I would not walk away from,” says Asher.

As a business that consumers visit for special occasions throughout the year, ensuring that loyalty and seamless purchasing experience online and in store would work was a critical component of the migration. For example, during Valentine’s Day, Lola’s Cupcakes receive four times the number of orders compared to an average day. On their previous system, that required bringing additional servers online to support the additional traffic. Since moving to Shopify, the team haven’t had to worry about managing significant spikes.

Having a centralised repository where they can build products for use in store and online has been critical for the business too. Previously they were using two separate databases that they had to manually compare and check to keep them up-to-date, inevitably leading to human error. By migrating to Shopify, they have been able to combine them and sync their product data into one unified solution for the team.

Lola’s Cupcakes is also now able to manage their inventory online and offline. This has enabled them to have a clearer indication of what they have sold across platforms, which positively impacts forecasting and saves resources.

As a food business, Lola’s Cupcakes must adhere to specific legal messages on their product labels, such as the ingredients, allergies and calorie count.Without this in place, Lola’s Cupcakes would not be allowed to operate.Thanks to the extensive range of apps on the Shopify App Store, Lola’s Cupcakes has found the perfect solution for their needs in the form of Apicbase. Through the app, they can build recipes, and add ingredients. When an order is placed, they can simply print a nutritional label that provides all the information the customer needs to see.

Results

Lola’s Cupcakes has been able to significantly reduce the total cost of ownership of their solution thanks to Shopify. Previously they were spending approximately £10,000 per month keeping the website operational, followed by similar costs for developers, and another £20,000 per month working with a development agency. By moving to Shopify, they’ve been able to reduce hosting costs down to below £10,000, reducing their spend by over 50% a month.

Not only has Lola’s Cupcakes saved costs, the company recently also celebrated its one-millionth order placed via Shopify POS in less than a year, with ambitions to explore the wider library of Shopify solutions to support its business.

The customer experience has improved as well. Lola’s Cupcakes adoption of Shopify has seen Lola’s Love Club go from strength to strength, with over 10,000 new customers added to the scheme.

The baked goods business continues to expand their usage of Shopify’s full complement of solutions. This includes launching a subscription offering for those customers who regularly want to purchase cupcakes. The brand is about to enter the next phase of its online strategy, replatforming its main website to Shopify imminently as it continues on its omnichannel journey.

In terms of what the future holds, Lola’s Cupcakes is looking to expand their international footprint through franchise models. Thanks to Shopify Markets the expectation is that they will be able to roll out to new countries quickly and easily.