At Aritzia, we are thrilled to be recognized by Commerce Cloud as a Pacesetter winner in the Sustained Growth category!

When Brian Hill, our founder and CEO, opened Aritzia’s first standalone boutique in Vancouver B.C. in 1984, his idea was simple: unite beautiful, high quality products, attainable price points and an aspirational shopping experience. We’ve kept on growing ever since. We now have 81 stores across Canada and the U.S. and a global reach online. We are incredibly pleased with our revenue performance since our inception.

Even now, in a time where many multi-channel retailers are struggling, our business has continued to grow. In fiscal 2017, we achieved net revenue growth of 23% with comparable sales growth of 14%.

And of course, we’ve also seen meaningful growth in our ecommerce business since we launched on Commerce Cloud (then known as Demandware) in 2012. By 2015, our ecommerce business grew to represent 12% of sales, and is on track to represent 25% of our total net revenue by 2021.

Our business model is one of the keys to our success. We conceive and develop our own exclusive brands, and sell them under the Aritzia banner. By approaching each of our brands as an independent label with its own aesthetic, we’re able to address a broad range of style preferences and lifestyle requirements. These exclusive brands currently represent over 90% of our business.

We’re also obsessed with providing exceptional shopping experiences. Our stores are all individually designed, with original art and custom furniture — and we even have our own in-house music director to curate our playlists. Online, we integrate high quality content into our core shopping experience and are always focused on improving the customer experience from start to finish.

So what’s next?

We are in the early stages of leveraging advanced business intelligence to further enhance our understanding and engagement with shoppers both online and in-store. We believe there are untapped synergies between our store network and aritzia.com, with the success of each channel benefitting the other through increased brand awareness and affinity. Within our ecommerce business, we are broadening our assortment of both our exclusive brands and third-party products to complement our existing offerings and drive new sales. And after having introduced shipping to international markets in October 2016, we have the opportunity to leverage those learnings to identify international markets for our stores in the future.

We are proud of what we have accomplished at Aritzia and look forward to working with Salesforce to continue the growth we have sustained all these years.