Kulani Kinis was launched in 2015 as a side hustle by its founders, Dani Atkins and Alex Babich, with a mission to offer affordable swimwear of superior quality and style. The company has quickly grown into an internationally recognized brand featuring a team of over 40 people across multiple countries with projected sales of more than A$30 million annually.
Challenge
Kulani Kinis has always had a wholesale component, but it’s the company’s direct-to-consumer (DTC) business that has soared in recent years. Looking to grow its wholesale business beyond a handful of big retailers, Kulani Kinis wanted to create an online business-to-business (B2B) storefront that was as easy to use as its DTC sites, with smaller wholesale customers able to self-serve purchase items from its catalog of over 800 products.
Solution
Already a Shopify Plus customer, Kulani Kinis started using Shopify Plus’s B2B feature, creating a dedicated expansion store that is only used for wholesale customers. This allowed Kulani Kinis to create a customizable buying experience with features that give smaller business buyers the ease of use typically found in a dedicated DTC store. One notable feature is a customized collection page with a slider that shows available stock for all swimwear sizes, and an easy add-to-cart capability, allowing customers to add multiple sizes and large quantities of products to their shopping cart without leaving the collection page.
“We’re all about branding, appeal and aesthetic, and with Shopify Plus, we’ve been able to make the wholesale store feel like us. Shopify’s B2B capabilities have given us the cohesive brand experience we wanted and customisation options that meet the needs of our wholesale partners. We’re not bound by others’ constraints,” says Alex Babich, Managing Director and Co-Founder, Kulani Kinis.
Results
With a dedicated B2B website that feels like a user-friendly DTC store, Kulani Kinis has seen a surge in recurring orders from returning customers. What’s more, the B2B storefront has attracted new wholesale customers from around the world who are using the site’s self-service features to place orders.
We’re using Shopify Plus to run a very specific B2B store theme and website. Thanks to features such as Shopify Plus’s native B2B companies profiles, we can set up a new retailer in the wholesale website to make the user experience highly personalized to that customer. We’ve been able to create a user-friendly space for smaller retailers around the world to select and buy our products to sell.
