How Abbott Lyon uses Shopify to grow personalised jewellery sales

Abbott Lyon is the UK's ultimate lifestyle and gifting destination, founded on sentimental, personalised jewellery. Their USP, where style meets sentiment, means every piece can be customised, whether on the product itself, in gift wrap, or through stacking and styling. The brand has expanded beyond jewellery into accessories and is pursuing a broader lifestyle gifting vision.

As Trading and Commercial Director, Isabel Howorth oversees ecommerce trading, web development, and commercial forecasting. She describes Abbott Lyon as "a super agile business" with complex product journeys due to personalisation, a combination that demands a platform that can scale without breaking. After 10 years on Shopify since the brand's conception, Abbott Lyon has evolved alongside the platform.

Shopify has powered Abbott Lyon's growth from day one, including Shopify Sidekick, which six teams across the business now use to access data, troubleshoot, and self-serve. With Shopify, Abbott Lyon has achieved:

• 30–40% growth between November and December 2025 (Black Friday/Cyber Monday)

• Strong checkout conversion with one-page checkout and new carrier service

• Shop Pay Installments drives 25% higher AOV and 25% lower return rate compared to overall performance

• 6 teams using Sidekick for data, troubleshooting, and self-service

The Challenge

Managing complexity without sacrificing stability

Abbott Lyon's product proposition is built on personalisation. Each piece can be customised on the product, in gift wrap, or through how customers stack and style items. That creates complex journeys from front-end to back-end, and historically, variant limits and inflexible platforms constrained how far they could push that complexity. Isabel explains: "We're a super agile business with complex products because of personalisation. Building on a stable base like Shopify has been essential. We know the end-to-end journey won't fall down, no matter how far we push the boundaries."

Preparing for peaks and big launches

Abbott Lyon runs high-profile collaborations (e.g., Stacey Solomon, Billie Shepherd), influencer campaigns, and TV advertising, all of which drive sudden traffic spikes. On previous custom-built platforms, Isabel had to "constantly worry about when the peaks would hit, when traffic would surge, and whether we'd fall over. There was always prep work to do." With other systems, they still have to notify teams when a TV ad goes live so they can prepare. That operational overhead was a recurring headache.

Scaling data access across a growing team

With a new website and a team experienced in ecommerce but not necessarily in Shopify, Abbott Lyon faced a data bottleneck. The wholesale team, finance, and customer service were constantly asking the website and trading teams for answers ("How popular has this watch been in the last 90 days?" "When was this basket created?") that required digging into Shopify. Every question routed through a small group created delays. When fixes were deployed for their complex, personalised products, customers with older baskets could still check out, but the team had no quick way to tell if those baskets predated the fix or if a new issue had emerged. Without self-service, bottlenecks built up. The learning curve stretched out.

The Solution

A stable, extensible platform for personalisation

Abbott Lyon has been on Shopify since inception (10 years) and has grown with the platform. The core value is "the real agility and scalability." They use Shopify's app ecosystem to proof-of-concept new features before investing in custom builds: "We've been able to proof-of-concept things through Shopify before investing in builds. It keeps us agile, when we have new products or features, we can test them quickly." Personalisation is built on metafields, which "opened the ceiling for us to go as complex as we wanted to." A custom-built app from their developers uses Shopify's metafield infrastructure to support multiple levels of personalisation while feeding data through to the warehouse.

Familiar checkout and native Buy Now Pay Later

Abbott Lyon is fully integrated with Shopify Payments and Shop Pay. All payment methods flow through Shop Pay, which gives customers a familiar checkout experience: "Our customers shop on many Shopify brands, so they understand the checkout. It feels smooth and familiar." When they added Shop Pay Installments, the shift was from a separate BNPL flow to one embedded in the natural checkout: "The big change with the native integration is that BNPL sits in the checkout as part of the natural journey, instead of feeling like you're stepping away from it." They also implemented the one-page checkout and a new carrier service with more accurate shipping dates in the same website refresh, a move they were nervous about, but which performed well.

Peak-ready infrastructure

Shopify removes the need to manually prepare for traffic spikes. That reliability supports their above-the-line marketing strategy, TV ads and influencer moments that drive spikes in traffic without requiring infrastructure planning.

AI-powered self-service with Shopify Sidekick

Shopify Sidekick has become the go-to tool for data and troubleshooting across six teams: website, trading, wholesale, wholesale ops, finance, and customer service. Isabel uses it "all the time," so much that she jokes she gets told off for it. The use cases span the business: quick data in trade meetings ("Just how many of these did I sell yesterday?"), finding new Shopify features, building AI widgets for shipping pages, and tracking individual customer journeys.

The most powerful application is troubleshooting. When a fix was deployed for a product and customers checked out from baskets created before that fix, the team used to assume the fix hadn't worked. Now they ask Sidekick: "When was this basket created?" Sidekick walks them through the journey: when the customer added the item, when they returned, when they completed the order. If the basket predates the fix, they know there's no new issue to tackle. That opened the door to richer insights: "If it can do that for an individual customer, it can give us richer insights across all customers: how often they visit before they purchase, for example."

Self-service has been the biggest shift: teams that used to route questions through the website and trading teams can now get answers directly from Sidekick. For a team new to Shopify, that has "streamlined learning processes" and reduced dependency on development partners.

The Results

Profitable peak growth

Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2025 delivered strong results. Isabel reports: "We were up 30–40% between November and December. We saw really profitable growth, largely driven by our above-the-line marketing, TV ads and influencer moments that sent traffic spiking to the site. A really good growth quarter." The platform scaled without incident. It supported the brand's investment in TV and influencer campaigns.

Strong checkout performance

Despite implementing a new carrier service with more accurate shipping dates at the same time as the new checkout, a change that could have increased friction, Abbott Lyon saw "a really strong checkout conversion rate that's been a great benefit to our overall conversion." The one-page checkout and Shop Pay flow maintained conversion while improving transparency on delivery.

Increased BNPL adoption and AOV

After integrating Shop Pay Installments natively in checkout, Abbott Lyon saw "more people using Buy Now Pay Later" and "a natural AOV uplift from BNPL customers." Isabelle notes this mirrors what they see with other providers, but "we're now seeing more people use it" because of the integrated experience, with "Shop Pay Installments driving 25% higher AOV and 25% lower return rate compared to overall performance."

Cross-team efficiency and data democratisation

Sidekick has transformed how Abbott Lyon works with data. Isabel is clear: "The ability to process and read data, that's definitely the biggest win." It has reduced bottlenecks, accelerated onboarding for a team new to Shopify, and enabled self-service across six functions.

A standout use case is loyalty research. Abbott Lyon is shifting from a new-customer focus to repeat purchase and wants to understand the profile of a loyal customer. They're using Sidekick to identify high-value customers and how often they return, then reaching out through CS to invite them to focus groups. Isabel says: "If we didn't have Sidekick, it would take so much longer to go through all the customer orders and identify a valuable one for us." What used to require manual report-building or developer support now happens in a conversation.