Editor’s Note
This article examines how Astrid & Miyu overcame the common challenge of fragmented customer data to unlock scalable growth.
Founded in 2012 by Connie Nam, Astrid & Miyu’s mission is to revolutionize the jewellery experience. Inspired by global travels and local artistry, they create inclusive, empowering pieces and personal, engaging experiences for customers.
Astrid & Miyu was growing rapidly, but faced significant challenges in scaling its business. Customer data was fragmented across multiple platforms, hindering its ability to expand as quickly as the team wanted. Crucially, a lack of a single view of customer data made it difficult to streamline operations and create a personalized experience across in-person and online shopping. This fragmentation made it difficult to grow into a truly unified omnichannel strategy.
To sustain growth and enhance the shopping experience, Astrid & Miyu needed a platform that could integrate all its data and apps into one place and would help optimize the shopping experience, online and in-store.
Astrid & Miyu migrated from Adobe Commerce (Magento) to Shopify in 2018. The move enabled Astrid & Miyu to harness the unified commerce capabilities of Shopify to gain a single view of its customers across everything from search and browsing to purchase and loyalty, both online and in-store.
— Connie Nam, Founder & CEO, Astrid & Miyu
Astrid & Miyu also has 23 brick and mortar stores across the UK, EU, and the US. To enhance the in-store experience—and thanks to Shopify’s seamless integration with its ecosystem—the brand chose Shopify POS Go and Shopify POS Terminal to power those retail units. The brick-and-mortar stores are designed to create relaxed, human shopping experiences, with the removal of glass between the customer and product, and with POS hardware that removes queues and allows the team to checkout customers anywhere in the store.
Using Shopify POS has also given the team access to real-time insights into how stores are performing at regional and global levels.
Shopify’s ease of use allows Astrid & Miyu to train team members quickly, empowering them to deliver exceptional services. The team also doesn’t depend on developers to expand their offering. The scalability of the platform and the vastness of its app ecosystem means they can launch new features quickly through native and third party integrations, improving their speed to market significantly.
With Astrid & Miyu selling internationally, the seamless integration of Shopify Payments and Shopify Markets has simplified checkout processes, enabling cross-border payments and the use of multiple local currencies. In turn, the business can tailor the shopping experience to the customer’s location and payment preferences.
— Molly Allen, Senior E-Commerce Manager, Astrid & Miyu
Since migrating to Shopify, Astrid & Miyu saw significant improvements in its business performance, processing over a million orders as of November 2023.
— Molly Allen, Senior E-Commerce Manager, Astrid & Miyu
By adopting a truly unified commerce approach with Shopify, Astrid & Miyu has streamlined backend operations, optimized the customer experience, and increased returning omnichannel customers fivefold. Customers who shop omnichannel have also exhibited a 40% higher lifetime value compared to those who shop exclusively online. It’s clear that with a detailed and singular view of customer and business data, centralized in an intuitive platform, Astrid & Miyu has been able to identify trends and opportunities while untapping new growth in the process.
Looking ahead, Astrid & Miyu plans to continue leveraging Shopify’s capabilities to lead the experiential retail trend in the jewellery industry, further expanding its global presence and enhancing customer engagement the world over.
