RunDTC is an ecommerce technology services agency that goes beyond solving tech stack challenges. They specialize in large-scale digital transformation projects for enterprise brands in both DTC and B2B. Additionally, they assist customers in understanding and maximizing their data architecture and infrastructure. And when it comes to reimagining the shopping experience, their solutions are built on leading commerce platforms like Shopify.
As a result of partnering with Shopify, RunDTC seen results such as:
- 96% overall growth from last year as an agency
- 87% growth in headcount
- 14% average growth in client revenues after launching with Shopify
The challenge: Break free from legacy tech stacks
While RunDTC understands that every business is unique, they typically see challenges fall into two main categories. The first involves businesses that are already on Shopify but need help streamlining their setup. These brands have often installed too many apps or overly customized their code. For them, RunDTC uses the opportunity to audit what’s been built and clean up both the code and technical implementation, enhancing performance, usability, and ultimately conversions.
The second category comprises businesses that are not yet using Shopify and need help modernizing their tech stack. This often involves evaluating where Shopify fits into their growth goals and identifying the right app ecosystem and complementary software solutions—such as order management systems—to support the business. “That's what we stay really locked in on: how do we help our customers grow their business?” says Paul.
Among brands looking to replatform, RunDTC has found many opportunities to modernize in the B2B space. “The wholesale business is still very inefficient,” says Paul. “Meanwhile, DTC ecommerce has come so far and become ubiquitous. Wholesale buyers are, in their own lives, shopping online. And so it's just such a natural step to move as much as possible over.” Many of these brands still struggle with a variety of order placement processes, from phone calls to emails and faxes. By migrating them to Shopify, RunDTC helps businesses turn these wholesale woes into modern shopping experiences.
“Because Shopify is so powerful and has so much functionality, it’s a great solution for wholesale. It brings the ease of a full feature set to B2B shopping. What would have to be custom built on a lot of other platforms lives in the app ecosystem in Shopify. There is something that will solve almost everything you need within Shopify.”
—Paul Zaengle, Chief Executive Officer, RunDTC
The solution: Take on major digital transformations
RunDTC's work philosophy is deeply rooted in their customers’ individual needs. They focus on driving growth by creating a thoughtful migration plan, implementation path, or both, for each customer. This means taking a phased approach that’s centered around the Shopify platform to minimize disruption and meet the specific goals of each business—across DTC, B2B, and full commerce transformations.
Many times, this also involves simplifying the complexities of the business process that have been built up over years of using a legacy tech stack. For these cases, RunDTC has found that creating a blend of modern technology and updating operational processes in tandem leads to success.
Unify global brand experiences
If there’s one type of opportunity that RunDTC loves to take on, it’s working with enterprise brands on major digital transformations.
Take Steve Madden. The global fashion brand for shoes, apparel, and accessories was already on Shopify, but allowing local teams to manage their respective Shopify admin tools had led to inconsistent brand experiences, suboptimal site performance, and a disarray of over 260 different apps across the platform. They looked to RunDTC to rebuild their existing Shopify environment in a way that would unify their 30 brands, all while maintaining overall brand consistency.
To achieve this, RunDTC customized a new theme within the Shopify Liquid architecture that met the specific needs of each brand while creating a consistent experience across all sites. They also built a robust Contentstack to Shopify Liquid integration that now allows teams to locally manage content across all brands at a global scale.
The result is a robust and scalable platform that provides enhanced experiences to customers, while giving Steve Madden’s business users additional capabilities like a content staging and preview environment, fine-grained permissions for managing content, and seamless approval processes from a single admin interface. This approach has given Steve Madden unified control across all of its brands and created measurable business impact—including a 16% increase in conversion rate.
“Steve Madden has 30 sites across five brands. And they’re global. That just shows how Shopify can handle large enterprise brands. And that’s something we’re proud to have done as an enterprise-size agency,” says Paul.
Streamline B2B ordering
When brands come to RunDTC to modernize, they’re often looking to emulate the experiences that already exist for DTC customers. One such company was Manduka, a leading yoga brand that sells products to studios that use their yoga mats, equipment, and apparel in their practices. RunDTC helped the brand unify 7,000 studios into one system on Shopify, replacing manual orders with a self-serve process for placing orders online.
“On the B2B side, moving from manual order placement to self service—it's the beginning of a revolution there,” says Paul.
Beyond the more standard commerce modernization projects, RunDTC has also found opportunities to transform B2B in creative ways. As Paul put it, “B2B can mean so many things.” For example, a high-end New York fashion brand came to RunDTC wanting to create an exclusive friends and family shopping experience that they could extend to employees and their select groups, alongside fashion influencers and other strategic customers. RunDTC used Shopify’s B2B functionality to create a gated site that could handle the traffic for a single day drop of discounted clothing items—and could accommodate premium features like allowing customers to order without paying right away.
“It's just thousands and thousands of orders in minutes. We used Shopify's B2B functionality because it has specific features, like setting up an account and needing to log in to gain access. Sometimes people think B2B has to be one thing, but that was a good, creative use of its capabilities.”
—Paul Zaengle, Chief Executive Officer, RunDTC
The results: Double the growth through major customer wins
Working with enterprise and B2B customers is what RunDTC strives for—and that’s in part made possible because of their partnership with Shopify.
“Shopify has innovated at a pace that I've never seen in this industry,” says Paul. “I've been in it for almost 25 years, and I've personally used many different ecommerce platforms—not as an agency, but as an operator. Shopify puts the control of ecommerce into the hands of marketers and business people, whereas previously, you had to be a tech geek to be in ecommerce.”
Specifically, RunDTC has seen a trend of brands on Shopify finding efficiency gains in terms of total cost of ownership. “The cost of keeping Shopify up and running and operating on it is just a fraction of some of the older platforms,” says Paul. What’s more, when functionality like a new site design is added to the platform, RunDTC has also seen these updates consistently lead to conversion rate improvements.
RunDTC has also celebrated stellar growth as an agency. In the last year, they grew 96% overall with an 87% increase in headcount. Doubling their impact and growing their team is a testament to their commitment to tackling major digital transformation projects, including an upcoming project to move a premium cigar company’s platform from a legacy homegrown B2B solution to Shopify. It’s also what’s helped them create impact for their customers, with revenue increases averaging 14% after launching on Shopify.
“For a lot of these companies, B2B is so much bigger and more important,” says Paul. “We're definitely seeing a flood of interest there, and we love what we're seeing from Shopify as a platform partner.”
