Case Study: Blu Kicks achieves rapid online growth and streamlined operations with Shopify

Blu Kicks - Customer Case Study

Blu Kicks is a San Francisco–based footwear brand that grew from a hand‑painted canvas shoe inspired by a colorful fish. The founders spotted a gap in the vacation shoe market—most beach footwear was bland—and faced the challenge of turning a homemade prototype into a scalable product while breaking through to customers and retailers.

They refined samples with a local cobbler, moved production to an overseas factory, and grew sales through word‑of‑mouth, blogging, social media and heavy outreach to press and bloggers (often via free samples). Operationally they use ShipStation, Shopify’s QuickBooks integration and Delighted, and handled fulfillment in‑house early on to learn the business. The result: press and influencers became their biggest traffic drivers, a summer pop‑up became a top sales channel, wholesale steadily grew, and simple tools streamlined accounting, shipping and customer feedback.

Blu Kicks