Case Study: Why This Australian Beer Brand Chose to Move to Shopify – And How Swanky Helped

Akasha Brewing: Brand overview

Founded in Sydney in 2015, Akasha Brewing has developed a reputation as one of Australia’s top independent craft breweries.

Fans of the brand’s American-style hop-forward beers can enjoy a pack from their couches or backyard BBQs thanks to Akasha’s DTC online store, or savour a brew in-person at one of three popular venues. Akasha’s beers are also stocked at a range of bars and restaurants throughout New South Wales.

Swanky’s relationship with Akasha began through our mentoring program for members of Australia’s Independent Brewers Association, of which we’re a proud service partner.

The challenge

The Akasha team had grown increasingly frustrated with WooCommerce and the way the platform was restricting their growth.

Introducing new features on their online store required significant – and costly – development time. They required a much more intuitive ecommerce solution that would allow them to quickly and easily implement marketing strategies without having to rely on developers.

Meanwhile, peak sales periods often resulted in site downtime and a poor experience for online shoppers. Therefore, another priority was choosing a platform that would continue to serve up a seamless experience to shoppers, even during times of high traffic.

As well as a more reliable, flexible and affordable ecommerce platform, the Akasha team were aware of a number of missed opportunities to capture offline customers and convert them into online shoppers.

What we did

Migration from WooCommerce to Shopify

After a period of platform validation with the brand’s immediate and long-term goals in mind, we recommended Shopify as a good fit for Akasha. Compared to WooCommerce, we were confident that this commerce-focused platform would better suit their needs and empower the brand to scale.

Our Shopify Experts in Australia replatformed the Akasha site from WooCommerce to Shopify, leveraging our rich experience in ecommerce migrations to ensure a smooth and secure transition.

The migration was led by one of our experienced Project Managers, who oversaw the transfer of product, customer and order data, alongside store development and app configuration. Find out more about what a WooCommerce to Shopify migration looks like with Swanky.

Akasha’s new Shopify store delivers a clean and modern design, leveraging images to support visual brand storytelling.

The new Akasha Brewing homepage.

The Beers collection page on the Akasha Brewing store.

An Akasha Brewing product page.

Tech stack consultation

We consulted on a future-proofed Shopify tech stack that will scale with the Akasha brand.

Solutions we recommended and implemented included:

• Okendo: This popular platform is a common recommendation of ours when it comes to collecting and showcasing customer reviews. Displaying social proof on your ecommerce store is particularly important for brands in the food and beverage industry, where shoppers often rely on the feedback of their peers when making a purchase decision.

• Klaviyo: As an official Klaviyo agency, we often recommend Klaviyo to our clients. This powerful data and marketing automation platform makes it easy for retailers to connect with customers across channels. For Akasha, it is a great option for automating email and SMS marketing, and helping to connect the online and offline customer experiences for beer drinkers.

• ShipStation: Integrated shipping and fulfilment platform ShipStation helps retailers swap time-consuming manual processes for automated workflows.

• Littledata: The market-leading provider of GA tracking solutions for brands on Shopify, Littledata provides a zero-maintenance solution that gives full visibility over customer behaviour in GA4.

Klaviyo flow implementation

A low cost channel with potential for high ROI, email represented an untapped opportunity for Akasha.

We advised on a number of ways to leverage email in the brand’s marketing strategy, including welcome flows as part of an offline to online customer capture and activation strategy, product release notifications, and event promotions.

After helping the team get set up on Klaviyo, we implemented birthday flows to prompt the brand’s VIPs to visit one of Akasha’s venues for a beer to celebrate. A simple automated flow like this is a great ‘surprise and delight’ tactic that can help make customers feel valued by your brand, thereby encouraging loyalty and referrals.

You can read more about how breweries can leverage email marketing in this article about destination retailers driving repeat purchases offline and online.

What does the client think?

Reflecting on the move to Shopify and his time working with Swanky so far, Dave Padden, CEO & Founder of Akasha Brewing, commented:

“Working with Swanky has been a pleasure – Jess has been amazing, explaining in layperson’s terms what different tools do and how they work so that we could understand how they enable our online sales strategy. 

“Ultimately, the Swanky team has made a scary project simple and easy for us, they have given us the info we need to make decisions, given us clarity on what we need to do and delivered something we are extremely happy with. We are confident we couldn’t have done it without them. 

“The additional strategy support Sean and the team has provided around activating collaborations and venue specific marketing strategies has been extremely valuable in re-engaging with our community. We are excited to work with Swanky into the future.”

What’s next for Akasha Brewing & Swanky?

With a new Shopify store in their business armoury, we look forward to working with Akasha Brewing to help them acquire, convert and retain more customers. Just a few of the areas we’re looking to unlock value include gifting strategies, brand collaborations, and B2B subscriptions.

The Akasha team has already taken the initiative, leveraging brand collaborations with Shute Shield rugby club, West Harbour, and other local sporting teams like Drummoyne Rugby and Sydney Uni AFL.

Move to Shopify with Swanky

Our teams in Australia and the UK frequently complete ecommerce migrations from established platforms like WooCommerce, Neto and Magento, as well as custom and headless solutions. We’ll work closely with your team to create a tailored migration strategy, taking into account your business’ current requirements, as well as your long-term organisational goals.

To talk to us about a move to Shopify, please complete our enquiry form.