Everyone Said Stores were Dying. LSKD Opened 35 of Them

Contributed by Locke Fitzpatrick, E-commerce Growth Manager, LSKD.

There’s a familiar narrative in retail: physical stores are a legacy cost, and the future belongs to digital. In the space of a single week this year, we saw three long-running Australian retail names like Glue Store announce they were closing for good, adding to a broader wave of retailers scaling back their physical footprints.

Maybe the problem isn’t physical retail, but rather how brands decide where to open stores and what they build once they get there.

Over the past five years, LSKD opened 35 retail stores across Australia, New Zealand and the US. We didn’t get there by following traditional leasing advice, and we didn’t treat digital as a replacement for a physical footprint either. Instead, we let our digital ecosystem tell us where our community already was, paired that with a clear sense of where we wanted to be as a brand, and built physical spaces — and partnerships — that actually meant something to the people there.

Let your data point you towards the right community — then bring the vision to life.

The traditional retail playbook builds a store in a high-foot-traffic strip and hopes the local demographic buys in. We’ve taken a different approach, combining commercial data with our own strategic vision for where LSKD belongs. We use a combination of tools, including Klaviyo and Shopify, to see where our community is already active and engaged.

But data only gets you to the starting line. It can tell us where our people are — it can’t tell us what will make a store feel like it belongs there, or take us all the way to where we want the brand to go next. That’s a call we make with data as an input, not the answer.

For instance, before we open the doors of a new store, we leverage Klaviyo to engage directly with our active community in that local area. We ask what matters to them, what they love doing on the weekends, and where they spend their time. That feedback helps us build a richer picture of the local culture and identify the people and partners who matter there, from local run clubs to gym owners.

Because you’re not just opening a store to capture foot traffic. You’re joining a community, and that means understanding it before you arrive.

The customer journey doesn’t stop at the cash register.

A customer’s relationship with your brand rarely stays in a single lane, yet too many brands treat their retail and ecommerce stores like separate businesses with competing targets. That disconnect leads to fragmented messaging and lost long-term loyalty.

When your in-store interactions connect seamlessly back to your central digital setup, the journey continues naturally after a customer walks out the door. A retail purchase can automatically trigger a location-specific flow – for example, prompting a Google review for that exact store or inviting them into your loyalty program. If you can connect the dots across both channels you can reward the shoppers that show up for you online and in-store with exclusive benefits that get them talking and sharing.

Physical stores are the antidote to the discount trap

When pure-play e-commerce brands feel growth slow down, the default move is often to run another sitewide sale. But Klaviyo’s research with James Hurman shows heavy discounting acts like a sugar high –  deep discounters grow 50% slower than low discounters, with topline revenue dropping an average of 27% in the two to four weeks immediately following a discount period.

Physical stores offer the ultimate alternative to constant price discounting because they build real-world brand equity you simply can’t create online. Stores shouldn’t just be a warehouse to push inventory. They’re a community hub for run clubs, meet-and-greets and product launches. They’re where someone tries a hoodie on before a 6am session, runs into their training partner, and leaves having had a conversation instead of just a transaction. Done right, retail is the physical embodiment of your culture and brand.

When customers can feel the quality of the product in person and connect with the brand culture face-to-face, you build full-price loyalty that outlasts any promo code. Digital drives the data. Physical stores anchor the relationship.

The proof is in the growth

Five years, 35 stores, three countries — including nine new stores opened in the last financial year alone. Last Black Friday, we broke the Shopify APAC record for the most sales processed in a single hour, at $10 million AUD. Total business net sales revenue passed $200 million in the last financial year.

With Black Friday and peak discount season around the corner, Aussie retailers don’t need to fear physical footprint – they just need to rethink how it’s measured and deployed. Shutting down stores to retreat into purely digital channels often treats the symptom but not the cause.

By using unified customer data to guide physical expansion and bridging the gap between in-store interactions and digital messaging, brick-and-mortar transforms from a legacy cost into your strongest growth driver. The future of retail isn’t purely online or purely offline, it’s knowing your community so well that the line between the two completely disappears.