ARNE
How a fast-growing quiet luxury brand escaped vendor lock-in, eliminated $600k in annual fees, and equipped their team to own their digital future.
01 — The Noise
ARNE had built something special. A quiet luxury menswear brand with genuine product-market fit and a loyal following. Growth had been strong—but the digital infrastructure hadn't kept pace.
The licensed mobile app was about to become a serious problem. The vendor's new pricing model would cost $600k per year in fees alone. The Shopify storefront carried years of technical debt from layered customisations. And the internal team—very talented and committed—was stuck in reactive mode, firefighting rather than building.
There's a pattern at this stage of growth: everything that felt simple becomes complicated. The tools that got you here start holding you back. You're being pitched solutions, but decisions get bigger and harder to make with confidence.
Mobile app was already a significant revenue channel with headroom for growth. But ARNE didn't own its mobile experience—they were renting it. Meanwhile, Shopify app sprawl and overlapping functionality were creating unnecessary cost and performance drag across the entire stack.
02 — The Signal
Discovery covered three areas: site speed, the mobile app decision, and analytics maturity. But the real finding was simpler. ARNE had outgrown their vendor relationships. They needed to stop renting capability and start owning it.
The mobile app situation crystallised this. Paying $600k a year to rent an app with limited control over roadmap, features, or brand expression made no commercial sense. Neither did continuing to patch a website built on outdated architecture.
We ran a full RFP for the app, evaluating three approaches. The recommendation: build a bespoke native app with Equal Experts. One-time capital investment. Minimal ongoing costs. Full ownership of the roadmap, the code, and the customer experience.
In parallel, we moved Shopify development to Swanky, a Platinum-tier Shopify Plus agency. Their brief: migrate to Store 2.0, eliminate the technical debt, and deliver a theme that was beautiful, lightweight, and fast.
The harder work was capability transfer. Selecting partners. Managing vendor relationships. Building governance. Coaching the internal team to shift from reactive to strategic. The goal was always to step back once the foundation was in place, leaving ARNE able to own their own operations.
03 — The Outcome
"Thank you for all of your time and effort on our brilliant new website which is going to play a huge part in the future growth of ARNE. It's amazing to see how far it has come over the last 7 years and this feels like a huge tech milestone as well as the app."
— ARNE Founder