Monos boosts brand awareness and sales with unified commerce

Connection has always been central to the minimalist luggage brand Monos. And with a name deriving from the Japanese concept of mono no aware—the deep appreciation of beauty in fleeting moments—Monos prioritizes delivering a simple and elegant shopping experience to their customers.

As a digital-native brand, Monos manages four online storefronts through Shopify to serve their customers around the world. When they sought to deepen customer connections by expanding into retail, they again turned to Shopify, this time to provide a point-of-sale (POS) system to support the omnichannel retail experience they envisioned.

Since adopting Shopify POS, Monos has:

• Grown revenue by 40% year-over-year in regions with physical store presence
• Reduced POS training time for retail staff to a half day
• Maintained ecommerce and POS operations with just one employee
• Improved customer engagement by enabling seamless omnichannel shopping experiences and unified customer profiles

The Challenge: Ensuring a unified experience online and offline

Before opening the first Monos retail store in Vancouver, Mike Wu knew that the move could introduce friction points. As Monos' Director of Ecommerce and Customer Experience, Mike had spoken with industry peers who had gone through similar transitions and heard about their challenges. "We knew there could be data conflicts and differences in the customer experience online and offline," says Mike. "So we wanted to be prepared."

Anita Yeh, Director of Retail Operations at Monos, also expressed the pitfalls she had witnessed when omnichannel brands failed to deliver a unified experience. "When you have disjointed systems, it can be frustrating for customers and staff," says Anita. "Customers today expect the ability to do things like in-store returns for online purchases, and associates need easy access to a customer's full purchase history. You need the right technology to get those things right."

With a relatively small team, Monos also needed to ensure the solution they chose to power their retail operations would not be a heavy lift in terms of maintenance, troubleshooting, and training.

The brand had recently enhanced their online checkout experience by upgrading to Checkout Extensibility from Shopify, which is a suite of app-based tools that are seamlessly integrated with Shop Pay. The upgrade resulted in a consistently faster checkout and more than ten hours saved per month in development time. Such experiences helped solidify the team's decision to further their investment in Shopify. "We needed a fully integrated retail solution," says Mike. "Shopify POS was the clear choice."

The Solution: Shopify POS simplifies retail expansion

Monos found that integrating Shopify POS was a smooth process. "There were no surprises," says Mike. "Adding Shopify POS was probably the easiest part of launching the retail store."

Today, Shopify fully supports the brand's vision of a consistent omnichannel experience. Sales channels, payment systems, and customer interactions are all integrated, allowing the team to provide the highest levels of service to their customers. Of the many omnichannel features of Shopify POS, Anita shares how a few have had an inordinate impact, saying, "Buy in store and ship is a feature we use day in and day out. It makes our guests' lives easier in cases where they've purchased a larger item that they don't want to carry out of the store."

The inventory management capabilities enabled by Shopify have also had a meaningful impact. "Shopify's real-time and centralized inventory management is very helpful," says Anita. "When our online team is servicing a guest browsing the website, they can see inventory available in a local store and hold it there for the customer to pick up that same day so they don't have to wait. Or if a retail associate is helping a customer find an out of stock item, they can see where we have it in a warehouse and get it shipped to them before their upcoming vacation."

In terms of onboarding retail staff, Mike shares how valuable it has been to have Monos' online and offline channels integrated through Shopify. "We train our retail staff not only on POS but the full online experience as well, which helps them understand how everything like order processing, refunds, and promotions work," he says. "Having it all on the same platform makes it much easier to connect the dots and gain a full understanding of the business, which results in better customer service."

The Results: Sales are set to take off

Shopify has helped Monos evolve into an omnichannel retailer that is reaping the benefits of unified commerce. The combination of having both an online and brick-and-mortar presence has helped the brand grow in various ways. "We've seen this halo effect of brand awareness where we've opened our stores," says Mike. "We've seen more organic web traffic from nearby IP addresses, and then sales have gone up as well."

Another key measure of success for the team relates to their operational efficiency. As Monos' sole point-of-contact for the Shopify platform, Mike says he rarely has to respond to troubleshooting requests. "Maintaining Shopify has become an afterthought, which is what we want," Mike says. "The ease of use of the system and the amount of labor resources it saves us is so important because it allows us to be more customer-centric."

Looking ahead, Monos plans to open multiple new retail stores in North America and eventually offer more flexible omnichannel purchase options like Buy Online Pickup In-Store (BOPIS), both of which will be made easier by Shopify. "We're here to make travel beautiful, and that will always hold true," says Anita. Together with Shopify, Monos is well on their way to exploring new horizons and continuing to transform the art of travel.