Malelions, a fast-growing Dutch fashion brand, worked with Flatline Agency to migrate from Lightspeed, modernise its ecommerce stack, and build a repeatable Shopify foundation for Lions Fashion Group’s growing portfolio of brands.
With Shopify, Malelions has:
- Migrated from project kickoff to go-live in three months.
- Recorded a 30–40% conversion uplift in the first weeks after launch, despite bracing for a post-migration dip.
- Increased conversion 80% year over year in its first full trading quarter after launch, while revenue rose and ad spend fell.
The challenge: a platform that couldn’t scale
When Jimmy van der Pas joined Malelions, he found a fast-growing fashion brand whose ecommerce operation could not keep pace with the rest of the business. As the business and its ecommerce setup had evolved, the Lightspeed store had become increasingly challenging to maintain, with occasional periods of downtime. Operational work was manual, ad spend was inefficient, and the team needed a platform built for its next stage of growth.
Jimmy raised the issue with Thijs Offermeijer, Malelions’ founder, within his first two weeks. By his third week, he had approval to strengthen the ecommerce team and start evaluating a new platform and implementation partner.
Jimmy’s earlier platform experience reinforced what Malelions needed next: stronger automation, less manual work, and a more predictable total cost of ownership.
The team did not want headless complexity for its own sake. It wanted a commerce platform that could carry the brand, remove manual work, and convert well, without overengineering the storefront.
We wanted more operational excellence and automation, with much less manual work for the team. We did not need to go headless. We needed a conversion-focused webshop that worked.
The solution: a three-month migration
Malelions weighed 10 to 12 partners before choosing Flatline Agency. Flatline ranked first across the team’s assessment, which covered the working relationship, pricing, references, and experience with other merchants.
The migration grew beyond a storefront rebuild. Malelions moved from Lightspeed to Shopify, replaced Mailchimp with Klaviyo, replaced Returnless with Returnista, and rebuilt its ecommerce stack around systems that work together.
The project kicked off around April 2024 and went live in the second week of July, about three months start to finish.
The team braced for a temporary dip. Instead, conversion climbed right away. SEO held steady while the team kept refining features and tuning the experience after launch.
Our conversion was 30–40% higher week on week. We weren’t running other campaigns that could have influenced the results, so we saw a significant increase in those first weeks.
Flatline stayed on after go-live through an ongoing CRO programme. The teams kept running A/B tests, building out the storefront, and acting on performance data, treating launch as a starting line rather than a finish. The team is even building AI agents to automate manual work while continuing to improve store performance.
The result: higher conversion, stronger revenue, lower ad spend
By Q1 2025, Malelions had finished its first normal trading quarter, past the post-launch refinement period and the Black Friday Cyber Monday peak. Jimmy reported higher revenue, lower ad spend, stronger margins, and improved organic traffic across the quarter.
The SEO loss the team had feared never came. Organic performance held through launch and improved the following year.
In Q1 2025 compared with the first quarter of 2024, our conversion almost doubled. It was around 80% higher than the year before.
For Malelions, the results proved out a model, not just a platform. They gave Lions Fashion Group a foundation it could reuse across a growing portfolio of brands.
From one migration to a repeatable multi-brand model
When Jimmy joined, Malelions and CROYEZ ran as separate brands. CROYEZ was already on Shopify. As the new Malelions stack and operating model proved out, Lions Fashion Group began standardising the teams, partners, and systems behind both brands.
Malelions and CROYEZ now share the same core stack: Shopify, Flatline Agency, Klaviyo, and Returnista. The shared model lets the group pool CRO, development, and email work while keeping dedicated specialists and distinct brand identities.
CROYEZ has since reached about a 4% conversion rate, a level Jimmy said the brand had never hit before. He described it as capable of doubling year over year, though the team is balancing growth with long-term brand building.
The group then applied the same model to Duquezzi. The new brand started from scratch with a smaller budget and a wholesale-first strategy. Jimmy said its storefront was nearly ready after a few weeks, while the backend reused the operational systems and partner stack already in place for the other brands.
That gives Lions Fashion Group a repeatable route to launch future brands without rebuilding every system and process from zero.
A lean ecommerce team supported by Sidekick
Around 10 people work across ecommerce for Lions Fashion Group, with specialists assigned to individual brands and some supporting more than one. The team leans on Sidekick for data, segmentation, personalisation, ad audiences, loyalty insights, repeat-purchase behaviour, restocks, discounting, and analytics.
With Sidekick, the team pulls reports and insights that used to be out of reach, or would have taken far longer to assemble.
Jimmy shared an example from a design meeting an hour before the interview. The team was reviewing a product from Malelions’ High Summer 2026 campaign and needed its margin and sales history.
Instead of going through all our sales reports and dashboards, I asked Sidekick for the product margin and its sales history over time. Within 10 seconds, I had the answer.
The team is also using Sidekick to support customer segmentation as it invests more in personalisation and its newly launched loyalty programme.
A partner ecosystem that works together
Jimmy’s endorsement reached past Shopify alone. He described the mix of Shopify, Flatline Agency, Klaviyo, and Returnista as a stack he regularly recommends to other ecommerce leaders.
The partnership model lifted a common burden off Malelions. Instead of playing middleman between disconnected vendors, the brand worked with partners who already understood each other’s requirements and coordinated the work directly.
Usually, the brand has to be the middleman, bringing every partner together and checking what works for everyone. In this project, we did not have to. The partners knew what was needed and solved it together.
Jimmy framed the Malelions migration as the start of a longer relationship, not the end of a project. The group carried the model into CROYEZ and Duquezzi, and expects Shopify and Flatline to support future brands too.
What’s next: more brands and international growth
Malelions and CROYEZ are preparing a future German storefront, subject to internal policy and operational requirements.
Lions Fashion Group is also readying more brands. One had already taken its first wholesale order at the time of the interview and was expected to launch ecommerce around January 2027.
With Shopify, Flatline and its wider partner ecosystem in place, Lions Fashion Group has a repeatable foundation for launching and scaling its next brands.
