The opportunity

Out of sight, out of mind

Air & Grace sits where style meets comfort, in one of the most competitive categories in footwear. The founder bootstrapped it at wholesale shoe shows, patented an insole board in 2014, and a decade later the brand sells 20,000 to 30,000 pairs a year online, with hosiery, belts, bags and accessories added recently. COVID ended most of the wholesale network, so the business is now entirely direct through its own site, run by a team of no more than six or seven people.

International had been a quarter of sales during COVID. Then markets softened, tariffs arrived, media costs and shipping costs rose, returns went up, and it drifted down to a low single digit share. Meanwhile the UK high street kept contracting and cross-border made it easier than ever for overseas brands to arrive and take UK share. New markets were not a growth luxury, they were a defence.

The setup itself was the problem. International ran on a merchant of record platform configured four or five years earlier by an operations manager who had since left. Nobody had looked at it in about two years. Nobody in the business even had a login.

Every lever that mattered sat behind somebody else’s login.

Challenges

Six things in the way

What we put in place

The controls came back in house

Shopify’s work on markets, regions and shipping zones meant the levers Air & Grace wanted could sit where the team already works. Glopal handles tax and duty calculation, filing, registration and monitoring end to end, with no international subsidiary required, while the brand keeps its own checkout, its own cash, its own DHL account and its own customer conversations. When Italy announced a charge on imported footwear, the response was a pricing change made in house that afternoon rather than a support ticket to a third party.

The commercial shape changed with it. A monthly retainer plus a small commission replaced a high commission with no monthly fee, which meant the business had to back itself to grow into the model. On the volumes at signing that was a real decision rather than a formality, and it paid back inside six months. Finance now reconciles two suppliers at month end, and can see the margin on a single order to the Ivory Coast.

The same levers, now changeable the same afternoon.

The timeline

Signed in September, shipping by December

Results

88% up, before translating a word

In the first 30 days on the new model, UK sales were up 8% year on year and international sales were up 88%. There was no international marketing behind that and not one translated page. The growth came from conversion: transparent landed costs, delivery quoted at 3 to 5 days instead of 10 to 14, and free shipping thresholds the team could set and move themselves. The very first order through the new system left on a Thursday for Los Angeles and arrived on the Monday, which is what allowed the shipping promise on site to change in the first place.

Markets then started surfacing on their own. The US, Ireland, Spain and France showed traction inside the first month, and an order went to the Ivory Coast for the first time in roughly a decade. That is the case for opening wide and letting demand declare itself, and it is the foundation that translation now gets to build on.

Thursday to Monday, which is what let the promise on site change.