Bed Threads

A typical tale for Elephant Room, but compounded with obscene growth

The beauty of partnering with a brand in the early days is gaining a deep operational and digital understanding. Bed Thread’s rapid growth in a short period of time presented several opportunities and challenges that many brands would be lucky enough to experience over a decade. In Bed Thread’s case, in less than two years. While this built strength within their business, it also created a strong sense of dependency on Elephant Room.

“We see Elephant Room as partners in our business. We love working with them, and we truly owe and credit so much for the success of Bed Threads to Elephant Room. I’m very grateful to be on this journey together,” Genevieve said.

Replatforming to Shopify — the beginning of no end

In the beginning, Bed Threads was operating on a Wordpress website. Genevieve wanted to create a place where you can shop, read, and get inspired. The problem: it wasn’t optimised for eCommerce. It was primarily a blog platform. This was the first port of call for the team at Elephant Room.

When Bed Threads switched over to Shopify a year later, they noticed a huge uptick in sales. “Our business doubled from one day to the next,” Genevieve said. Elephant Room improved the UX and UI, optimised the website for conversions, all without losing a home for Bed Threads to continue running their digital publication.

It was striking the balance between marketing and technical understanding that enabled Bed Threads to continue focusing on what they do well from a brand, product, and content perspective. 

This project cascaded into training a team, building new content experiences, optimising page load speed, building a whole new marketing stack within Shopify, and using the available technology to build their bundle builder.

Building the bed bundle functionality

From scripts to check-out edits, Elephant Room leveraged every single feature available in Shopify Plus to create Bed Thread’s Bed Bundle Builder.

The task at hand was not straightforward, especially with their 3PL and warehousing demands. While most other systems would tumble at volumes (especially through sales periods), Bed Thread’s bundle builder is testament to the resilience of the Shopify Plus platform.

Case in point: Black Friday sales. Bed Threads had all cylinders firing as Elephant Room leveraged every possible cavity of the Shopify Plus platform — automation, order tagging, pre-orders, and bundles to name a few.

Creating a sophisticated CMS

Everything on Bed Thread’s website — from building your own bundle, to the home page, to the journal — is focused on integrating eCommerce and content together. 

“Being able to marry up these two sides of the business in the most natural and organic way has been a huge credit to the technical abilities of Elephant Room,” Genevieve said.

Elephant Room equipped Bed Thread’s in-house content team with additional tooling and functionality beyond a Shopify plus CMS. This fully bespoke CMS for Bed Thread’s in-house content team allows customers to shop the journal articles without leaving the page and shop products from the collection pages.

There is no ‘us vs them’ mentality

The partnership between Bed Threads and Elephant Room is proof that you can still augment internal teams with a strong strategy and vision with external support. It’s not about dividing the tasks or projects by two, it’s about multiplying by two. Bed Threads have hired internal developers while still working with Elephant Room as a developer agency. 

“Another thing I love about Elephant Room, is they aren’t just solely looking at the Bed Threads business. They leverage insights from the whole industry, eCommerce space, and experience across the board. This is so useful especially when you’re growing your business, as you need the outsourced skills to complement what you have in-house,” Genevieve said.

Future category & geographical expansion

For the last four years, Bed Threads has pursued aggressive growth. Now the brand is in a position to shift this focus to a more sustained approach, with consideration of multiple macro-factors such as the cost of advertising going up and general inflation.

Together, they will continue thinking about new ways to merchandise Bed Thread’s new product lines and displaying them in the best possible light to make it easy for customers to understand and shop. This includes continuing to grow their US and UK businesses launched late 2019 and 2021 respectively.

“Innovating and learning together is something we will continue to do. There was no TikTok 4 years ago, yet, now we have a robust content strategy for TikTok and an in-house editor,” Genevieve said.

One thing is certain, neither Bed Threads or Elephant Room would have anticipated running businesses as large as they are now — a true reflection of a successful partnership.