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, Shopify Plus configuration 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

Custom Embedded Shopify Apps

Bombas had unique inventory, SKU and bundle needs. They needed a custom solution to track their SKUs across both men and women's sizes. Since the sock are unisex in nature, often the same SKU would service a men's small, but also a women's large. Bombas needed a custom solution to solve for these SKU overlap issues. Also, at the time, Shopify did not have a native bundle solution, so the Sunrise Integration team had to develop a custom app to support the creation of custom bundles.

Keeping track of all that inventory was the next hurdle. Bombas needed direct integration to their 3PL warehouse. Our team was able to use real time API communications between Shopify and the 3PL to create a custom app to manage the inventory levels.

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 embedded UI/UX controls to manage the products right from the Shopify Admin pages.

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.

Complex Data Migration

Bombas was coming from a Magento platform and needed all their data migrated to Shopify Plus. This included product details, inventory levels, customer data and order history. For other agencies, this may have been a problem, but not for our data and API integration experts.

One of the more complex issues was the remapping of "configurable products." In Magento, a configurable product looks like a single product however it is actually a list of variations. Each list is a separate "simple product" with a unique SKU. Shopify did not support this type of configurable product so our migration team needed to remap the configurable items into their own unique product/variant combo in Shopify Plus. Our data team created custom scripts to transform the products into compatible products in Shopify. 

Maintaining proper historical order data was the next challenge our data migration experts solved for Bombas. If you simply try and import old orders into Shopify, you won't maintain the correct historical dates, order numbers, transactions, payments and line-items. To properly import historical orders, we needed to remap the old values to the new configuration in Shopify. There is very specific order of operations that Sunrise Integration had to follow to ensure accurate data. Luckily, our data migration team has lots of experience with the nuance of Shopify's platform and we maintained the historical data integrity.

The Outcome

For a large business like Bombas Socks, migrating to Shopify Plus 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.