Sportswear & Fitness brands on Shopify Plus.

There’s no denying the popularity of Shopify Plus as an ecommerce platform, but it’s especially popular with sportswear and fitness brands. Thanks to its range of features, Shopify Plus can be tailored to meet the changing needs of businesses in the fitness industry. In this blog, we’ve looked at the best sports and fitness brands on Shopify Plus and what makes their websites successful.

A Game Changer: the best sports and fitness brands on Shopify Plus.

1. Gymshark.

Gymshark is a brand anyone interested in sports and fitness will have heard of. It has quickly grown into a global sensation, and it’s easy to see why. Gymshark provides a wide range of high-quality workout clothing and boasts a strong online presence, ably supported by Shopify.

A speedy migration to Shopify Plus - something the company did only 10 months after kicking things off with Magento - was a game-changer for Gymshark. It enabled the brand to scale at pace, knowing that Shopify could handle the load and easily adapt to changing needs.

Gymshark has embraced everything that Shopify Plus has to offer, making it one of the top sports and fitness brands on the platform. For example, it has embraced Shopify’s unique POS system, enabling the company to manage online-offline customer experiences with ease and give customers the chance to interact with fitness stars. Though the move to Shopify Plus was sure to have been daunting for Gymshark, the business now has a website that ticks every box and can grow with growing customer demand.

2. SourceBMX.

SourceBMX sells everything BMX enthusiasts could want, from bikes to clothing and protective items, but if there’s one thing that makes SourceBMX’s ecommerce website stand out, it’s the state-of-the-art bike builder. A lot went into creating the bike builder and integrating it with Shopify Plus, but hard work has certainly paid off. This builder works on all of SourceBMX’s international websites and fits perfectly with the business’ branding.

Working with us, SourceBMX's existing theme was used but improved upon. Our talented team made a customisable BMX builder that looks simple but handles complexity, allowing customers the chance to build a bike that works for them. Customers can pick their build mode, choose a frame, parts, seating brakes and more. The builder even lets customers create custom wheel designs, so every aspect of a bike’s design can be bespoke. To take things one step further, the website makes it possible for customers to share their builds with other SourceBMX fans on social media and save them for later. Read more about the SourceBMX project here.

3. Fabletics.

Since 2013, Fabletics has grown into one of the most successful sports and fitness brands on Shopify Plus, providing affordable and fashionable athleisure clothing. A lot of what Fabletics does is centred on using customer data gathered through a VIP subscription membership. Choosing Shopify Plus as its eCommerce platform allows Fabletics to provide customers with various discounts and benefits - all of which are handled as part of a subscription-model ‘club’ - whilst using the information to improve its online performance and give customers exactly what they are looking for.

The Fabletics website also has a ‘Shop the Look’ feature, which allows customers to see what others are wearing whilst also boosting social proof. This is a clever choice from Fabletics and one that other brands are sure to follow. Instead of simply providing clothing, it’s building a community of like-minded shoppers with social proof to entice them into making a purchase. Everything about the Fabletics website has been designed with customers’ shopping journeys in mind. It highlights many featured shops, making it easier to find new collections and a quiz to help customers make the right purchasing decisions.

4. Muc-Off.

Renowned for its dedication to creating protective solutions for bicycles and motorbikes, Muc-Off has established itself as a key player in the market. Whilst already harnessing the capabilities of Shopify Plus, Muc-Off wanted to elevate its online presence further. They partnered with us to craft a sleek, functional, responsive, and mobile-first website. This was designed with user experiences, conversions and elevating average order values in mind. Simultaneously, the goal was to give the internal Muc-Off team greater control, enabling them to manage the Shopify Plus theme through Shopify Plus without relying on intricate code modifications.

Like Muc-Off's impressively crafted products, its Shopify Plus website masterfully balances aesthetics with functionality. For example, the custom subscription service (known as Ride Boxes) enables customers to tell Muc-Off about their riding habits and create a personalised box of bike essentials to be delivered every three months! Also, the bespoke store locator has been tailored to align with the rest of the website’s design language. Read more about the Muc-Off project here.

5. Kayla Itsines.

Kayla Itsines, an Australian gym trainer, quickly realised that many of her female clients had a similar fitness goal. They wanted to slim down without bulking up too much. She began focusing on providing aerobics classes, nutrition and fitness advice and sharing inspirational ‘before and after’ photographs on her social media pages. As her offerings became more popular and an increasing number of women asked her for advice, Itsines realised that she needed a platform that could handle everything. That is how her Shopify Plus presence began.

Itsines' Shopify Plus website is somewhere for women to find the information they need, without having to message Itsines directly and wait for a reply. There’s a range of ebooks and fitness programs available, all of which aim to help women take control of their fitness. By choosing Shopify Plus, Itsines can provide a website that works for her unique requirements. She’s not offering products but advice, programs and information.

6. Aquaplanet Sports.

Aquaplanet Sport has been enjoying ecommerce success for a while but decided to trade in its WooCommerce website for a more flexible Shopify Plus website, which blubolt handled from start to finish. Aquaplanet Sports aimed to boost sales and expand into new markets, which the new site built on Shopify's Online Store 2.0 delivers.

The Shopify Plus website is sleek and modern and shows off Aquaplanet Sport’s lifestyle images in tiled galleries. Built by blubolt, we used Shopify's 'Sections Everywhere' feature so the Aquaplanet Sports team can easily change parts of the page and update images when necessary. The website also boasts various features that make shopping easier and the website faster, such as a 3D viewer so customers can see products before buying. There’s also a 'What's in the box' section to explain what each product includes, giving customers the information they need to make the right purchasing decision. Read more about the Aquaplanet project here.

7. Alo Yoga.

Alo Yoga is a sports and fitness brand on Shopify Plus that’s doing things a little differently. The brand’s mission is to bring yoga to the world, and they are doing it via in-person studies and an impressive ecommerce website. Using the Alo Yoga website, customers can enjoy online subscriptions to yoga, fitness and meditation in a way that works for them. Shopify Plus facilitates Alo Yoga’s offering of subscription-based sports and fitness, allowing customers to enjoy yoga and meditation in a way that works for their lifestyle. This is done in a simple and sleek way, but one that makes the online subscriptions easy for both customer and brand to manage.

The brand also offers a wide range of yoga clothing, all of which are available on the website. By using Shopify Plus, Alo Yoga can sell and ship its collection to fans worldwide. As Shopify Plus is such a varied and versatile platform, brands like Alo Yoga can use the one website for various uses. In this case, selling products and managing online subscriptions.

8. Outdoor Voices.

Outdoor Voices’ focus on Shopify Plus has been to create a sense of community. The brand is big on separating fitness from performance, encouraging people to embrace having fun and releasing endorphins rather than simply working out to achieve an end goal. One of the most impressive parts of Outdoor Voices’ website is OV Kits, which allows shoppers to select a kit based on the type of exercise they want to do. OV Kits will then recommend clothing that will work best. Customers have the freedom to choose the colour and size whilst they are guided by the website.

This unique Shopify Plus feature gives customers confidence in their purchasing decisions while still giving them the freedom to choose clothing that works for them. Outdoor Voices combines the brand’s knowledge about fitness and the sports industry and adds excellent customer service.

9. Altitude Sports.

When it comes to sports and fitness brands on Shopify Plus, Altitude Sports inspires a lot of others. Altitude Sports was an early adopter of the online world, and it quickly embraced the benefits of having an online presence. Back in the 1980s, the brand sold outdoor equipment and sports clothing from a brick-and-mortar shop in Canada, but it embraced ecommerce and launched its website in 1999. This made it one of the first sports and fitness brands to kickstart things online. Since then, the Altitude Sports website has evolved and grown, including a move to Shopify Plus.

There’s much to like about the Altitude Sports website, including the website’s unique search function. Instead of having to type everything into the search bar, the website automatically provides suggested results to the customer as they type, displaying them before they’ve clicked ‘enter’ to search. Not only does this make using the website easier and quicker for a customer, but it could encourage them to buy another or different product. A customer might not have considered buying anything else, but the website’s suggestion could convince them otherwise.

10. ZyroFisher.

Partner of over 60 of the world’s leading brands, ZyroFisher is a highly-respected distributor of cycling and outdoor sports brands across the UK and Europe. With a mission to help these brands achieve their full potential, ZyroFisher delivers an end-to-end range of services to reach and sell to consumers through a variety of channels. The brands ZyroFisher had were hosted on VisualSoft (with the exception of FastHouse, which was already on Shopify) and had different CMS setups, making internal team collaboration between all the brands they distribute very difficult.

So, in migrating all nine brands to Shopify, blubolt needed to deliver on multiple requirements for ZyroFisher: create one “parent” theme so each of the nine brands could be “children” of that parent theme, meaning each child theme reflects the individual brand guidelines, create an identical backend setup for each of the nine sites to enable seamless management of the +60 brands they distribute and ensure the setup enabled the ZyroFisher team to manage multiple sites without having to learn any new technologies when moving between brands. Read more about the project here.

Winner takes it all: the sports brands succeeding on Shopify Plus.

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