Case Study — Roland Mouret
Breaking Barriers: Bridging Shopify Merchants into the Chinese Market
Roland Mouret is a luxury womenswear brand based in London. The brand’s enduring appeal is a testament to Roland Mouret’s gift in flattering the female form, and his designs are adored by some of the most famous and stylish women in the world.
As well as being stocked in multi-brand stores around the world, Roland Mouret also operates a brick & mortar store in London, and a D2C e-commerce website built with Shopify.
Eager to expand their business in China to target the 400 million millennial consumers that drive 1/3 of global luxury sales, Roland Mouret wanted to offer a more localized service to Chinese customers. Yumi was engaged to build their China e-commerce flagship store.
Within 2 months, Yumi launched a Cross-border WeChat mini-program store, synced with and entirely managed by Roland Mouret’s Shopify dashboard. This allows the brand to manage their mini-program shop completely remotely, without the need for resources on the ground in China. Moreover, the Shopify dashboard is already familiar to their team, thus minimizing on-boarding requirements.
Orders from Roland Mouret’s mini-program shop are synced back to Shopify and dispatched to their warehouse to be fulfilled from the UK to the customer in China. Payment is directly settled to GBP, managed through cross-border payment gateway, Nihaopay.
The ability to manage their China sales channel from their head office in the UK has resulted in a 86% reduction in costs compared with managing a WeChat shop locally. Moreover, their mini-program store allows more seamless integration with their existing WeChat Official Account content, lowering the barrier to conversion for Chinese consumers.
The backend of the Roland Mouret mini-program is supported by Yumi’s white-label SaaS service. A few key components that form part of Yumi’s technology stack include:
- Processing Queues & Queue Workers that allow for scalable batch imports.
- End to End Logging for monitoring and uptime checks to guarantee maximum uptime.
- Configuration Management to support white-labels through a single service.
Introducing Yumi Shopify sync
“Direct to Consumer” brands are rewriting the rules of retail globally. These brands thrive on online channels, but the digital ecosystem for social media and e-commerce differs vastly between China and the rest of the world. International D2C brands are missing a huge opportunity to reach the Chinese e-commerce market (3x larger than the US). On the other hand, Chinese D2C brands are missing the opportunity to expand their global footprint and grow sales outside of China.
Yumi is an omni-channel solution for brands anywhere in the world to manage a single shop that works on Shopify and on WeChat, the most popular social commerce platform in China. International D2C brands on Shopify can now simultaneously have a presence on WeChat, while Chinese brands on WeChat can now simultaneously have a Shopify website to sell to an international audience.
With Yumi Shopify sync, Shopify merchants can sync their Shopify stores into the Yumi Marketplace mini-program in a few clicks, or launch their own white-label e-commerce mini-program.
