Watching the BÉIS line: flash sales case study

When travel essentials brand BÉIS decided to run its popular Black Friday / Cyber Monday flash sales, its digital team partnered with CrowdHandler to develop a fully integrated, customised solution that not only matched BÉIS' effortlessly cool designs – but its customers' expectations too. 

A Flash Sale for luggage . . . without the baggage

Founded in 2018 by actor (and avid traveler) Shay Mitchell, BÉIS has since become a go-to for everything from luggage and travel accessories to backpacks, totes, and diaper bags. It’s no surprise that BÉIS products are so popular: they’re chic and highly functional without breaking the bank, so people don’t have to choose between style and utility.

During the 2022 holiday season, BÉIS launched its first Flash Sales in the US, Canada, EU and UK. Although these doorbusters were expected to be popular, demand was so high that the team knew they needed to optimize and prioritize the consumer experience for 2023.

Julie Chalker, VP of eCommerce and Digital  at BÉIS, explains the challenge:

“We knew that we wanted to retain and build on the demand we had seen for our Black Friday events for 2023,” she says. “Our goal for this year was to take insights from our consumer and internal teams, and build a better experience.” 

A big part of the BEIS brand is the connection it has with its community and putting consumer needs and feedback at the forefront of their decision-making process. 

“We were hyper focused on two-way conversations with our consumers during our daily flash sales this year,” Chalker says. “The goal of this was to ensure that there was alignment on expectations for what the experience was going to be and that things were fair.”

After seeing a demonstration of CrowdHandler, Chalker was quickly convinced it was the right product.

“We understood immediately that CrowdHandler wasn't just focused on putting users in line,” she says. “It facilitates the whole process, from countdown, to stock syncing, to sellout.”

Fully customized and integrated 

BÉIS uses Shopify Plus, so the first step was to install our waiting room integration for Shopify users.

Although each drop would be managed through CrowdHandler, Chalker and her in-house digital team were reassured that they would be able to customize every element of the experience during each of the 16 Flash Sales. 

“It's about so much more than, say, getting the colors right,” Chalker continues.

“It's not just about creating aesthetically on-brand experiences, it's also about being intentional in the functionality of the solution and anticipating our consumers’ needs. Partnering with CrowdHandler allowed us to fully customize our experience, ensuring that the end-to-end experience reflected the BEIS brand." 

As an omni-channel brand, BÉIS often needs to consider how experience will translate offsite to other channels like their new Mobile App. It was a requirement to find a partner that either had an existing solution or would be able to partner with BÉIS's developers and mobile app partner, Tapcart, to come up with a solution for those shoppers.

“This is one of the ways in which the CrowdHandler team was a real partner to BÉIS,” continues Chalker. “As well as consulting throughout the development process, they worked with us to deliver a custom block for Tapcart, allowing us to integrate the Flash Sales into the app seamlessly.”

On the day – how it worked

For the four days during Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2023, BÉIS ran 16 cleverly promoted and tightly managed Flash Sales, dropping a different 'cult' product in a coveted color in each of their four territories, every day. 

When each waiting room opened at 8am local time, BÉIS first told customers which product was going on sale - a line of 1000 items that 1000 lucky customers would be able to purchase at a 50% discount - via social, email and text. 

Like the previous year, the 2023 sales were a tremendous hit with BÉIS’ engaged and eager customer base. 

All customers who entered the waiting room between 8am and 9am, whether that was via the website or the app, saw a countdown together with carefully branded messaging explaining how the Flash Sale would work. 

At 9am the 1000 units dropped and everyone who had been in the waiting room was randomly allocated a place in line. Once customers got to the front of the queue, they had five minutes to make their purchase. 

Confidence

This year, however, the BÉIS Digital and E-commerce teams were able to coordinate the drops and control each sale a lot more closely, and to communicate with customers through the waiting room, as well as through their usual channels.

With CrowdHandler managing the stock and syncing, each drop closed automatically as the product sold out, taking away the need for manual supervision.

“Introducing new technology can be daunting at any time, especially during the holiday season” says Chalker, “but CrowdHandler’s attention to detail made the whole process easier.”

“After our first day, our team was more than comfortable. It was clear that the CrowdHandler team had done their due diligence from top to bottom, and that gave us a lot of confidence. We leaned into automation in the process where we could, which ultimately meant less effort and risk for the team!”

And were the sales as successful as hoped? Put it this way: during the 2023 Black Friday weekend, the black BÉIS Weekender Bag was in the top ten most purchased products across all of Shopify’s brands.