At the recent Bristol Shopify meetup, hosted at Brightpearl UK HQ, we were lucky enough to be joined by Lush Longboards; one of the world’s leading brands of long skateboards.
Founded in 1999, Lush was the UK’s first longboard brand and success came quickly for a team clearly passionate about their product. It was around 2009 when the business really took off, when longboards really started to become popular within the skateboarding community.
It was around this time when Lush made the move to Shopify from Magento; Co-Founder and Owner Richard says, “We found Magento to be too complicated for the needs of our business. It requires developer support and at the time we didn’t have the resource; we needed something simple and something we could manage internally.”
They now sell their goods globally across four Shopify stores:
- Lush Longboards: The brand’s original store which remains their largest
- Cult Wheels: Specialists in longboarding wheels
- Vandem Longboard Shop: Stockists of Lush and other leading longboard brands and accessories
- Sabre Trucks: Specialists in longboard trucks
Richard joined us for a Q&A which you can view here or check out some of the top takeaways below:
Shopify Apps
Shopify is supported by a huge ecosystem of apps which can help grow your webstore. When asked which app helped his business achieve more, he quickly answered Stamped.io. Stamped is an automated email order follow up which asks customers to review whichever product they have just purchased. Richard says “The best thing about Stamped is that it allows people to leave their feedback within the email, and gives them the option to share on social media.” The ability to leave feedback so easily has formed a huge part of Lush Longboard’s marketing tactics – they can now let the customers do the talking (and selling) for them.
Customer First
When asked for his number one business tip, Rich replied “It sounds obvious, but put your customers first.” Pretty simple advice, but Rich and the team at Lush have taken it one step further, putting customer opinion and feedback right at the center of their business. Lush have no shortage of glowing customer reviews, and they use these to their advantage. They highlight customer reviews on their website, use them in remarketing adverts and quote them in their PPC adverts. Rich says the best part of having such positive customer reviews is that “third party validation is much stronger than your own validation.”
Keeping customers engaged at every point of the buying journey is something which serves them well – they use MailChimp for regular update emails, keeping the customer informed as their order progresses. Rich’s thoughts were: “Retained customers are much cheaper than newer ones.”
Tech Savvy
As a multichannel retailer, Lush understand the importance of having technology at the center of their business. Lush Longboards became the first Brightpearl customer ten years ago and have kept it at the center of their business ever since. Rich explains “Running multiple Shopify stores can become a logistical nightmare, that’s why having a centralized place, like Brightpearl, is really important. It allows us to manage our sales from all our stores in one place.”
Lush also use technology to help improve their customer service. They manage support through Zendesk and utilize the Zendesk chatbox, allowing a quick and easy response to rare customer problems and complaints. Social media is something the team also utilize, though they take their social strategy with a pinch of salt: “It’s very easy for a business to spend way too much time on social media.” Rich explains that Lush have very simple goals when it comes to social media and it’s to get their customers talking about them. He says “Social media is much more impactful when you have other people talking about your brand, that’s why excellent customer service is so important to us.”
These are just a couple of the great insights and actionable advice from Rich. You can find out more by watching the recording:
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