How Petit Bateau Japan drove significant revenue growth with Swym Wishlists

The customer

Since they came to Japan in the 1990s, Petit Bateau Japan has earned a reputation for premium, high-end quality clothing products for everyone from children to adults. Their success has spread to 30 retail stores in or around Japan, not to mention a growing ecommerce presence.
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Challenge

If you think of Petit Bateau Japan as a “gift brand,” you aren’t alone. Naoki Kobayashi, Technical Platform Lead at Petit Bateau Japan, reports that one of the brand’s key challenges with Japanese consumers has been battling this perception. Products like Petit Bateau Japan are great for gift-giving and special occasions, consumers seem to think, but not for affordable everyday wear.

Petit Bateau Japan wants to change that by engaging with its customers more often, expanding both seasonal and everyday sales. To that end, the brand has been running more extensive commerce promotions with unified commerce strategies, even providing some of its products via Amazon. The hope is that customers will experience lots of new touchpoints and help Petit Bateau Japan shake the “for-special-occasions-only” tag.

Since Petit Bateau Japan needed a customizable storefront online to shift products around for seasonal sales, a developer recommended they adopt a headless approach. Ideally, Petit Bateau Japan could manage and customize its ecommerce front page at will, adapting to seasonal sales and shifting trends in Japan. That would make enormous headway into changing the company’s reputation and becoming more accessible to Japanese consumers.

But there were problems. Headless ecommerce isn’t as common in Japan, so there weren’t many case studies to follow and emulate. Any time Petit Bateau needed to make a change, it required extensive API specification document additions to make sure developers understood the requirements. Managing the architecture independently proved more difficult than anticipated. The storefront even lacked a simple wishlist feature, which made customers groan and got in the way of Petit Bateau establishing itself as a more “everyday” brand.

Solution

Kobayashi noted that working with Swym—particularly the Wishlist Plus feature—erased many of the problems of headless ecommerce. Petit Bateau Japan adopted the Shopify platform, where it could add these new features at will. “Once you want to use [an application],” Kobayashi says, “just click the installation button, and then you can use it. It’s very simple.”

Petit Bateau Japan could get to work and add new touchpoints with customers it wanted to engage beyond special occasions. During their summer sale, they enabled notifications like price drop alerts, leading to thousands of wishlist users. Soon, Wishlist Plus sessions represented 96% of all their store sessions, and wishlist items’ average order value (AOV) was 19.87% higher than the store’s overall AOV.

This approach made other integrations easy, too. Petit Bateau Japan integrated with Klaviyo for more effective customer notifications, a tool that helped them track conversion rates. With each new customer notification, Petit Bateau Japan added a critical touchpoint to bring customers back to their ecommerce presence.

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“We sent a lot of price drop emails from Swym to customers,” Kobayashi says. “I think that was a wake-up call for us because this kind of notification was very, very beneficial for us. It could lead to a lot of sales through this notification [alone].”

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The Klaviyo integration helped increase the average revenue-per-send for different touchpoints: wishlist reminders, low stock alerts, and the aforementioned price drop alerts. After enabling the Klaviyo integration, their revenue grew by 11.53% in the next three months. Customers could visit the site more often to browse the changing inventory. Petit Bateau Japan had finally positioned itself to change its reputation and reach more customers.

Working with Swym made integrations like Klaviyo much more seamless, making it possible for Petit Bateau Japan to engage customers with multiple touchpoints:

• After implementing the Wishlist Plus feature with Swym, Petit Bateau Japan stopped receiving complaints. Customers were no longer frustrated; they were shopping. Additionally, the new price drop notifications via Swym helped Petit Bateau Japan push seasonal sales periods to contrast with the usual gifting holidays, which drove more sales. Revenue per send for the Price Drop campaign was 148% higher than the Wishlist Reminder campaign.
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• Petit Bateau Japan also enjoyed the Klaviyo integration thanks to its ability to track conversion rates. This gave them new abilities to enhance their marketing strategy and refine their approach based on which sales resonated more with customers.
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• The headless approach also started bearing fruit for the first time. Supported by Wishlist Plus, Petit Bateau Japan had a better way of handling its ecommerce infrastructure and streamlining with Shopify POS or similar systems.

Overall, 9.19% of all orders via the store came through Swym. Changing a brand’s perception isn’t easy, but increasing the total number of touchpoints has given an instant boost to Petit Bateau Japan’s ability to engage its customers throughout the year. Not just on special occasions.

Results by the numbers:

• Swym boosted AOV by 19.87%
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• 11.53% revenue growth in the 3 months following enablement of the Klaviyo integration
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• 148% more revenue per send with the price drop campaign compared to the Wishlist Reminder campaign