Buying a wedding dress online hasn’t always mirrored the in-person shopping experience, and Grace Loves Lace has been determined to change this.
As the largest independent DTC bridal brand in the world, having an owned ecommerce channel has been essential to their success. It’s also mission-critical to how they communicate brand ethos.
You don’t have to be a blushing bride to see the intentional brand choices that ladder up to Grace Loves Lace’s growth; they rely heavily on curated Shopify site content to convey connection, elegance, and love across their six regional sites for Australia, New Zealand, US, UK, EU, and Canadian-based shoppers.
But as the bridal brand scaled, they encountered a glass ceiling that couldn’t be ignored if they wanted to keep growing.
To maintain steady growth, the brand needed an ecommerce solution allowing the team to sync or push content across multiple country-specific sites, enable non-technical team members to make site updates, and add richer content to Shopify without relying on developers.
Not only did the team need to manage multi-store more efficiently, but they wanted to slash general speed to market significantly.
Before Shogun, Shopify storefront designs were hard-coded by developers and were challenging to optimize quickly, says ecommerce specialist Madeleine Thistleton:
“Our site pages required a significant amount of custom code to create page layouts and high-caliber customer UX that have become standard for Grace Loves Lace. This gave us little room to optimize, and it was challenging to publish pages quickly.” — Madeleine Thistleton, Ecommerce Specialist, Grace Loves Lace
For Grace Loves Lace to meaningfully scale up global ecommerce, the search for an intuitive yet powerful page builder tool was a go.
Grace Loves Lace chose Shogun’s Advanced plan to take their six Shopify sites to the next level by recreating the in-store wedding dress shopping experience online.
Managing site content across six international stores is typically a tall order for Shopify merchants.
Take site updates, for example. If you update a store policy or testimonial block in one area and want that same update across other sites, you’ll have to do each update manually. This is not only tedious but amounts to inconsistencies.
With Global Snippets and content syncing in Shogun, however, the Grace Loves Lace team can now more efficiently create and reuse content across multi-store instances.
Content syncing helps Madeleine’s team create content in one place, then push it across multiple stores in just one click, selecting what to bring over. No longer needing to make individual, manual global updates to each site makes content reuse a breeze.
“Shopify doesn’t allow syncing across native pages. But with Shogun, we can make those same updates in just a few clicks. We save so much time not having to make those updates manually,” says Madeleine.
When there are store policies, value props, or product information to repeat throughout the store, the team also leverages Global Snippets to capture and deploy pre-styled content across all six sites. Bulk edits to Global Snippets can be rolled out to each instance fast.
For example, the team can create a Global Snippet created for their global showroom page and use it in multiple site instances. When one gets an update, they all reflect that same update without the manual hassle:
Without needing to start from scratch each time they have content to reuse, Global Snippets accelerates workflows. As Madeleine shares:
“With six websites, it’s necessary for us to duplicate pages and sync them across to each site. Plus, now with Global Snippets, it’s so much more convenient to create one snippet, and it’ll carry across to all six sites.” — Madeleine Thistleton, Ecommerce Specialist, Grace Loves Lace
The team can save preferred page styling and has the ability to templatize layouts they love, meaning they can build visually stunning blog layouts in minutes, like this:
“Depending on the type of page we’re creating, on average, it takes around one hour. This includes syncing the page across our six websites. The majority of our blogs use a uniform template we built with Shogun, so being able to copy the page with the ‘duplicate page’ feature is super easy and saves us a lot of time.” — Madeleine Thistleton, Ecommerce Specialist, Grace Loves Lace
From detailed lookbook and collections pages to fun, creative pages like their testimonial page—aptly named The Guestbook, the team can publish in a fraction of the time compared to custom dev work thanks to Shogun’s pre-built templates.
Additionally, the ecommerce team now has more unique page elements to use outside of what’s available in Shopify. Elements like the table, video, and product box elements help communicate details that would otherwise be difficult to add in native Shopify themes.
With Shogun, Grace Loves Lace has gained flexibility, faster speed-to-market, and can optimize pages quickly across all six Shopify web properties.
Additionally, the brand has created 200+ custom pages, which are regularly synced to and subsequently tailored for each country’s store for a cohesive brand experience—no matter the country storefront you shop.
The team has also saved 30 hours per week building new pages from scratch—from lookbooks to unique blog post layouts.
With Shogun, Grace Loves Lace has gained:
With a powerful page builder tool Grace Loves Lace is empowered to convey their full brand ethos—the emotion, quality, and all—to their ecommerce channel at scale. The solution has scaled with them as they’ve grown:
“Undoubtedly, Shogun is an essential page builder solution for us now. Its intuitive building has reduced the amount of time it takes us to create a page or replicate an existing one. Plus, Shogun’s support team is fantastic to work with; they respond promptly and offer comprehensive support, which has been incredibly helpful for us.” — Madeleine Thistleton, Ecommerce Specialist, Grace Loves Lace
