Dermalogica improves site speed by 44% after moving to Shopify

Established in 1986, Dermalogica is more than a leader in skincare essentials—it is a trusted provider of skills-based training for a global community of skincare professionals. Founder Jane Wurwand wanted to empower people by giving them the skills and the opportunity to pursue a serious profession in skin health. It wasn’t until later that Dermalogica became more than an education business, offering consumer-based products to skincare therapists for their clients to use at home after treatments, before extending this directly to consumers.

Recently, in search of a more affordable, flexible, and responsive ecommerce solution, Dermalogica teamed up with Shopify Plus—which opened up even more doors for the brand.

After moving to Shopify, Dermalogica saw:

• 119% increase in sales
• 45% increase in conversion rate
• 44% improvement in site speed

Challenge

The previous ecommerce solution, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, wasn’t built to cater to individual, regional markets—a significant roadblock for a global brand. Because of this, human errors were easy to make, such as accidentally launching a US product in the UK. It was absolutely crucial that the new platform could enable each local market within the business to operate on its own as an independent entity.

Another downside—and the main catalyst for migrating to Shopify—was development complexity and associated costs. Salesforce Commerce Cloud was undergoing a significant upgrade when Dermalogica started to look for another platform; however, because Dermalogica had heavily customised its instance, the brand was unable to easily upgrade to that new version while bringing its customisations with it.

With the ever-growing needs of the brand, Dermalogica needed a new platform that could be customised to suit each pillar of the online business: products, treatments, and ‘skinspiration’—an information hub consisting of advice and articles applicable to each skin type and customer need.

Dermalogica’s mission has always been to empower the beauty industry to be taken seriously; to not be solely about “making people look pretty,” explains Senior Ecommerce Growth Manager, Kevin Rowlands. In that vein, it was imperative that the new platform could convey the educational element, as well as the treatment and B2B side of the business—which collectively are their largest drivers of revenue.

Solution

From day one, Shopify’s roadmap and vision for the future resonated with Dermalogica as another tech-first company not afraid to push boundaries. The brand was initially drawn to Shopify for its local market agility which would allow for simplified, cross-border selling, all from one single store. Plus, they wouldn’t have to part with their historic company data from the previous platform.

Shopify’s ecosystem of apps and integrations brought about even more excitement. One integration in particular is Retention X, which analyses products in users’ baskets to provide unique insights as to how to keep them coming back, based on factors that led them to convert in the first place. “We had no way of capturing these insights before moving to Shopify,” Kevin adds.

Enabled by Shopify Flow, the team were able to build an automated custom-flow with Retention X that would suggest the right product sample to include with an order based on the best conversion rates.

As far as operational efficiencies, Shopify’s self-serve features within editing pages and content have brought pace to the day-to-day trading of the business. Setting up promotions and launching full marketing and CRM campaigns can now be done within the space of half an hour – without the need to brief a developer.

Results

The migration process ran for six weeks from beginning to end, with Shopify’s teams on hand throughout to help see the brand through an aggressive time to market. What bolstered this was the ability to meet in person with Shopify and walk through various solutions in detail, some of which the business hadn’t ever considered before. In particular, SEO updates were implemented for the first time, which garnered a huge leap forward in terms of organic traffic.

In just one month after replatforming from Salesforce, Dermalogica saw a 119% uplift in sales, a 45% in conversion rate, and a 12% uplift in AOV, almost immediately positively impacting the brand’s bottom line.

Overall user experience (UX) has also benefited with a 44% improvement on site speed and customers now being able to find what they’re looking for much more quickly. This is reflected in improved organic search rankings, a 43% increase in unique visitors, and a 14% decrease in bounce rate.

With Shopify completely transforming the way Dermalogica’s DTC arm does business, it is beginning to explore what this might look like on the B2B side. The idea is “not to reinvent the wheel, but take all of our learnings and historic work with Shopify for DTC, and imagine how that might look for B2B going forward” explains Kevin.