Johnstons of Elgin partnered with blubolt to drive growth across its international Shopify Plus store, increasing AOV without a full site retheme.

The problem

Grow the value of every journey, without waiting for a new site.

Johnstons of Elgin already had an established international Shopify Plus store. The opportunity wasn’t to start again; it was to make the existing experience work harder.

A wider retheme was under consideration, but the business wanted to keep improving performance in the meantime. That meant finding practical ways to improve the customer experience, merchandising and platform reliability without putting growth on hold.

The central question was simple: how do you communicate the value of a premium product more effectively across a complex international store, and turn that stronger proposition into commercial growth?

Rather than treating this as a list of isolated website fixes, we partnered with Johnstons of Elgin through our Grow package and applied our Journey-Led Growth approach. We looked at the whole customer journey: how products were presented, how international customers moved through the store, how reliable the underlying data was, and how operational requirements affected the experience.

The aim was to keep improving the store customers used today while building a stronger foundation for whatever came next.

The solution

Turning retained insight into continuous improvement.

Growth didn’t begin with a one-off audit and end with a list of recommendations. Working collaboratively with the Johnstons of Elgin team, we brought strategy, design, development, QA and deployment together into a continuous cycle of optimisation. This meant insights could quickly become improvements, tested and delivered against the real needs of the store.

That retained model gave the brand the flexibility to respond to opportunities as they emerged, keeping the focus on the customer journey rather than simply working through a predetermined backlog.

Strengthening the journey to a premium purchase.

For a luxury brand, product presentation has a direct role in helping customers understand what they are buying, and why it is worth the investment. We focused on making that journey clearer and more consistent. Product and collection imagery was refined, with improvements to image ordering, crop control, typography and responsive image behaviour. We also enhanced packaging and personalisation journeys.

Individually, these changes were focused improvements. Together, they created a more considered path from product discovery to purchase.

The objective was not simply to make the site look better. It was to help customers explore products with greater confidence, understand their details and see the full value of a higher-value purchase. That is Journey-Led Growth in practice: improving the moments that influence a customer’s decision, rather than treating each page or feature in isolation.

Protecting international journeys while improving the data behind them.

Johnstons of Elgin’s international operation adds another layer of complexity. Customers in different markets need the right navigation, pricing and personalisation, while the business needs the underlying systems and fulfilment processes to work reliably.

As such, we addressed these practical issues across geolocation and country selection, Swiss navigation, Global-e limitations, multi-market pricing and personalisation, packaging requirements and warehouse management system needs.

At the same time, we strengthened the data used to understand what was happening across the journey. We improved GA4 cart and checkout tracking, investigated attribution issues, and introduced additional reporting. Recommendation interactions were tracked, while advertising identifiers were brought closer to Merchant Centre requirements.

We also reviewed product feeds, GTIN and EAN handling, DataFeedWatch and emerging OpenAI commerce requirements, helping Johnstons of Elgin prepare not just for how customers shop today, but for how product discovery is evolving.

The result was a more robust foundation for making decisions: better visibility into customer behaviour, fewer friction points across international journeys and a store that could continue improving without waiting for a complete retheme.

The result

Bigger baskets. Stronger sales.

The focus on premium merchandising, personalisation and customer experience helped drive a 20.6% increase in average order value, with customers spending more when they purchased. Alongside this, total sales increased by 4.0% and net sales by 4.5%, showing stronger commercial performance from the existing Shopify Plus store.

The increase in order value is particularly significant. By making it easier for customers to understand the value of Johnstons of Elgin’s products and navigate towards higher-value purchases, the programme helped generate more value from each transaction without waiting for a full site retheme.

There is still more to unlock. With basket value strengthening, the next opportunity is to improve traffic quality and checkout progression, helping convert that stronger customer value into further orders and revenue. It’s a clear example of Journey-Led Growth in action: continuous, commercially focused improvements that strengthen the experience today while creating the foundations for what comes next.