Code

18 months ago, the pro-racing brand Alpinestars didn’t even have a Europe-facing online store. Now, they consistently realize high double-digit growth in their new Shopify Plus flagship store.

Scaling up to worldwide DTC e-commerce 

When Lars Kristian Stråtveit started as Head of E-commerce at Alpinestars in July 2023, he faced a unique opportunity: to scale up an established brand into the global DTC e-commerce space. Alpinestars has been supplying motor-, car- and bike racing enthusiasts with high quality protective gear since the 1960’s but, apart from a DTC Shopify website serving the USA, the brand mainly sold its products through a worldwide network of retailers and dealers.

Fast forward to the last quarter of 2024, and Alpinestars’ new digital flagship store achieves a 51% increase in conversion globally, compared to the previous year. Lars Kristian: “The combination of a strong brand, marketing investments and a premium e-commerce experience enabled us to scale quickly and serve our most passionate consumers in a more personal way than ever before. We saw 10X growth in the first year, and we’re still realizing high, double-digit growth.”

The power and scalability of Shopify Plus

Alpinestars evaluated several e-commerce platforms to help them scale, but in the end Lars Kristian decided to stay with Shopify. “At first because the US team was happy with it, but I realized soon enough that Shopify is simply the best option. Now I’m super happy with it, too.”

Reflecting back on the decision, he says: “Some people say that Shopify is for small companies, not for enterprise – but that’s not our experience at all. With Shopify Plus we could solve every use case we had, and because it’s so scalable and easy to build on we can move really fast. Because of its rich ecosystem there are very few things we have to build from scratch. It’s a matter of building the frontend and adding the tools. Code has been a great help, too, they have a lot of knowledge on what tools to use.”

Code: tech savvy, straightforward and fast

To tackle the more complex development projects Lars Kristian turned to Code, after a brief stint with another Shopify agency. “The UK-based agency we initially worked with focused on marketing and design,” he explains. “But we are pretty good at marketing ourselves. What we need is developers. Code pitched themselves as technically savvy, and they had an Agile approach: that suited us perfectly. I also liked their straightforward, Dutch style.”

After the decision was made to build a new store instead of continuing with the existing store, things went fast. Lars Kristian: “Projects like this usually involve a lot of meetings and bureaucracy, but Code put a small, dedicated team on our project, we met often, we built a quick first version and refined it from there. Amazing how much time you can save that way.”

The go-to Shopify tech stack to realize exponential growth

Asked what his goals were for the store, Lars Kristian doesn’t have to think long. “We wanted exponential growth. Our focus was on building a strong membership program, and nurturing a loyal customer base. Alpinestars has a lot of fans worldwide, as it’s one of the global leaders in the motorcycle- and racing world. We aim to give them a premium experience, make them feel part of the club.”

Since it is also a very international audience, expansion across countries and especially European markets was key. Together with Code, Alpinestars implemented a range of proven tools to realize these objectives.

Loyalty, referrals and rewards with Yotpo

Encouraging reviews is an important element in Alpinestars’ loyalty program. “Our customers spend a lot of time on research —these are technical products that can save lives. It takes 30 days for our customers to buy, on average. Reviews are key to building trust.” Alpinestars currently boasts over 3.000 reviews and over 2.000 site reviews with Yotpo, with an average rating of 4.7 out of 5.

Email marketing with Klaviyo

A big part of the membership program is of course email marketing. After Alpinestars set up the basic flows with Klaviyo, they created a number of membership flows for the loyalty program. With impressive results: subscription went up 17X within a year, with open and click rates for the Welcome series reaching 72% and 20% respectively.

Lars Kristian: “We’re currently working on merging the membership email flows with the regular ones into one holistic, personalized program.”

Alpinestars is also working on attribution modeling, to get more insight into where conversion happens in the customer journey. Google, Meta and Klaviyo all tend to claim attribution for their channels, which blurs results. With tools such as Adloop, Polar Analytics and Klar brands have access to a more accurate picture. “Performance marketing is one of the largest expenses in our e-commerce business. It’s critical that we optimize how we deploy our budget, to reach our performance- and brand goals.”

Customer service with Gorgias and AI

Gorgias makes a huge difference for Alpinestars’ customer service team. Thanks to its AI Agent Roberta, the team can handle 1.000 tickets a week and responds to tickets within 40 seconds. Lars Kristian: “We served as one of the key partners for the tool. It took some time to make it that good, we worked with the Gorgias team to train it — but now it’s like a third member of our team.”

AI agent Roberta closes about 60% of tickets at a customer satisfaction score above 4.0.

Arianna, CX specialist at Alpinestars, reports: “It has changed our lives. We have so much more time to actually talk to customers. We don’t dread coming into work and having hundreds of tickets waiting.”

Internationalisation with Shopify Markets

Alpinestars uses Shopify Markets for Europe, with all its different countries. Lars Kristian: “That way we don’t have to duplicate all the stores, which would be harder to manage. Markets allows us to localize, while also making it possible to update the site for all markets in one go. A drawback of Markets is that apps aren’t always that well integrated with it. Crediting Yotpo loyalty points in the UK, for instance, is a bit awkward: 1 point is worth 1 euro, but 0,86 pound. But for the vast majority of use cases it’s been working well.”

Returns and exchanges with Returner

To handle returns and exchanges Alpinestars uses Code’s own Returner app, which aims to encourage customers to exchange instead of returning their product. Lars Kristian: “The number one reason for returns is sizing. The strong exchange experience of Returner has helped us reduce returns by 30%.”

Code also built a few custom integrations to connect Alpinestars’ warehouses. Lars Kristian: “We receive returns in multiple locations. In Europe we have our own warehouse in Italy and a 3PL we opened this month in Germany.”

Custom Code: integration of the suit configurator

A stand-out feature of the new store is Alpinestars’ suit configurator. Lars Kristian: “We want to create the ultimate flagship store, so this custom feature was a must to stand out. With the configurator, pro and semi-pro racers can design their own unique, made-to-measure suit, with logos of their sponsors and everything. We collaborate with Precismo on the 3D scanning technology behind it, the quality is quite impressive.”

Code is currently working on the backend of the configurator. “They’re integrating it with the whole production process for this bespoke product: gathering the orders from customers and dealers all over the world, creating production sheets, creating orders for them, shipment and tracking… It’s a lot of custom work.”

Personalized search with Raptor

Another thing Alpinestars is currently working on with Code is customizing the site’s search function. Lars Kristian: “We’re implementing Raptor, to customize our product feeds. It’s fully AI driven and much more personalized.”

Building on agile culture

While working on the new store, Lars Kristian was also busy building an e-commerce team. When he started, he was on his own: now, he has a team of 12 around him. Looking back on it, what was the main takeaway in the process?

“It really drove home for me that you need a small, dedicated team to go deep and move fast. This is by far our biggest successfactor, I think. But also the most challenging thing: it’s so tempting to start increasing the team, to get more work done, but it actually becomes slower, not faster.”

He explains: “As soon as you grow you have all these layers of people trying to make something happen, but what they often end up producing is a lot of meetings, powerpoints and emails. It just creeps in.

With my team I try to create a culture that focuses on execution instead of planning. For that to work, you need to build trust in the team. People need to feel confident to share their ideas, to make updates and changes, to make shit happen without fear of failure. Of course we fail sometimes, but that’s OK.

You have to ask yourself: if something goes wrong, can we roll it back? The answer is practically always yes — but we really need to have systems in place where we can question everything. Where we can point out that some new solution is not working better than the old one, formulate a hypothesis on how to fix it, implement and iterate.”

The future: being an amazing retailer

Not surprisingly, Lars Kristian envisions an Agile future for Alpinestars’ store. “We’ve got a 5-year business plan, a yearly strategy and quarterly goals, but we think it’s important to welcome change over following the plan. Part of that is frequently re-prioritizing the backlog, together with Code, based on impact versus effort. We do this so often because we get new data, insights and trends every day, so it’s critical to iterate based on that.”

More specifically, he plans to keep focusing on increasing membership and further improving conversion. Part of that is to personalize product recommendations, increase upselling, and drive more repeat purchases — but innovation also plays an important role. “We seek to create unique experiences. By introducing new products, like our airbags for instance; but also by expanding into new audiences through high end fashion collaborations, where we create unique, premium products.”

At the same time, Lars Kristian is very aware that mastering the fundamentals is always key. “Taking all the key touch points to the next level: more premium product photos, videos, inspirational content, UX, and providing a best-in-class cart to home experience. You know, being an amazing retailer basically. We’ve only been online for a little over a year now, we still have a lot of things to do there. It’s a boring answer, but at the end of the day, that will be the number one priority.”

Do you also want to scale your E-Commerce business further with the help of Shopify and Code? Then contact us, we are happy to help you.