Bombas, an innovative and socially conscious apparel brand, grows their business as an early adopter of Shopify

First Glance

Bombas is a socially conscious clothing brand that focuses on making comfortable, high-quality apparel. Their cornerstone product is socks, boasting seamless toe, ultra-soft cotton, and honeycomb arch support. For every item that gets purchased, Bombas donates an item to the homeless community on the customer’s behalf. More than 40 million items have been donated to so far with that number growing every day. 

Bombas wanted to implement a large-scale data migration from Magento to Shopify, which meant that they needed development experts on both platforms. They found our team through the Shopify Experts database - Sunrise Integration was one of the only development agencies that specialized in both Magento and Shopify at the time - and the rest is history.

The Challenge

Keeping true to their creativity as a brand, Bombas was an early adopter of Shopify. However, this required several complex features to take their business to the next level. At the time, there weren’t as many options for customizations as there are in present day and as a result, our team called on our creative problem solving skills to build several custom solutions for their needs. Some of the key challenges including unique product SKU mappings, inventory bundles and 3PL integration. Since Bombas had a large inventory or complex SKU structures, the challenge would be to develop a tool to handle this. At the time, Shopify's native inventory management was not sufficient for their business needs.

If all that wasn't enough, Bombas needed to migrate their data from their previous platform to Shopify. Transferring all of their product data, customer information, and order histories to Shopify Plus was expected to be a long, complex process. Each platform has its own way of storing and managing data so we needed to devise a data mapping scheme to support this transfer.

All of these challenges may have scared other development agencies but not us. Bombas turned to Sunrise Integration for custom Shopify app development and fulfillment integration.

The Solution

Finding the right solution for Bombas involved careful planning, time, and technology investment. Sunrise Integration was committed to creating the right approach and resources, to overcome the challenges, and let Bombas thrive on the new Shopify platform.

Bombas required custom solutions to extend the Shopify Plus capabilities. Our team outlined the following custom needs to complete the digital transformation for Bombas:

• A virtual sku system to package and market the same SKUs differently to different customers

• Custom order status app service

• Connecting their inventory to 3PL (Amware) with a custom app

• Product bundle service to handle complex sock packs

• Managed AWS hosting for Shopify apps and 3PL communication services

The custom Shopify apps were developed using PHP and the Shopify REST API layer. The Sunrise Integration development team used a SAAS AWS hosting environment to create the services and embed them into Shopify. The custom developed Shopify apps gave the Bombas team direct access to UI/UX controls.

3PL Integration

One critical need for Bombas was to maintain their connection to Amware Logistics, their 3PL service at the time. A third-Party Logistics provider takes care of all the shipping-related operations for a business. This includes storing products in warehouses, packing and shipping orders, handling returns, and more. Essentially, they take care of all the behind-the-scenes work so that Bombas can focus on what they do best - creating great products and marketing them. The Sunrise Integration API team was sure to develop a robust solution keeping all data flowing to the 3PL. This integration would allow for real-time inventory updates and tracking, ensuring Bombas always knows what's in stock and where their products are in the shipping process. This level of visibility and control is instrumental in managing a growing ecommerce business effectively.

Our integration team developed a custom portal and API communication platform that synchronized invoice and tracking data with Shopify. This allowed the 3PL to continue handling all the logistics while Bombas focused on business. This allowed Bombas to scale their business without worrying about the increasing complexity of order fulfillment.

The Outcome

For a large business like Bombas Socks, migrating to Shopify as their ecommerce platform offered numerous benefits. Shopify's ability to handle high traffic volumes and transactions ensured that the Bombas online store remained fast, reliable, and always open to customers. The Sunrise Integration development team is proud to have solved the technical issues and let Bombas focus on their core business. Bombas is able to innovate and grow in the ecommerce space.

With these custom solutions built specifically for their needs, Bombas became one of the early success stories of Shopify. Their team was able to operate and scale their business to huge success with ease while doing away with the complexities of their previous platform and workflows.