Shrimpton Agency

About the Brand

BÉIS (pronounced "base") is the travel and lifestyle brand founded in 2018 by Canadian actress and entrepreneur Shay Mitchell in partnership with brand incubator Beach House Group. Mitchell started the company out of a simple frustration: nothing on the market was simultaneously stylish, functional, and affordable — so she sketched the now-iconic Weekender Bag on a cocktail napkin and built a brand around it.

What began as a seven-piece collection became one of the defining direct-to-consumer success stories of its generation: a DTC luggage powerhouse reporting around $200 million in annual revenue by 2023, and in August 2026 the subject of an agreement for Samsonite to acquire 85% of the company at a $210 million valuation — a deal Mitchell called "a dream come true."

For a brand like BÉIS, the website is not a sales channel. It is the entire store.

The Challenge

When BÉIS arrived, the brand needed its first true eCommerce experience — a flagship digital store built from the ground up, designed by NYC's Case Agency and brought to life by our team:

• The whole business was direct-to-consumer, so the site had to carry the entire weight of the brand
• A fashion-editorial aesthetic had to translate into a high-converting storefront — never one at the expense of the other
• The celebrity trap: it had to feel like a design-led travel house, not celebrity merchandise
• Luggage is a high-consideration purchase — dimensions, materials, compartments, colorways — so product pages needed depth without clutter
• Traffic was social-driven and overwhelmingly mobile, with drops that sell out and restock — the site had to handle velocity

The Approach

1. Design first, engine second. Case Agency's bold design vision was realized through custom components on Shopify Plus — never forced into off-the-shelf theme patterns.

2. Mobile as the primary storefront. BÉIS's customer discovers the brand on Instagram and shops on her phone. The experience was designed mobile-first: tactile, fast, and immediate.

3. Conversion as infrastructure. Justuno, Klaviyo, and Yotpo were woven into the experience from the start — capture, email and SMS, reviews and UGC — not bolted on afterwards.

4. Built to move fast. Modular templates for drops, collections, and restocks, so the team could launch at the speed of social.

The Build

• Custom Shopify Plus storefront, engineered rather than themed
• Product templates designed for high-consideration luggage buying: dimensions, materials, compartments, and rich lifestyle imagery
• Integrated conversion stack: Justuno for on-site capture, Klaviyo for email and SMS, Yotpo for reviews and UGC
• Optimized asset delivery for high-resolution campaign and lifestyle photography
• Scalable architecture to support viral growth, sold-out drops, and an expanding product line

The Outcome

The result was a digital flagship worthy of the brand: fashion-house aesthetics with DTC conversion mechanics underneath — unmistakably BÉIS, from the first scroll to checkout.

The brand went on to become a generational DTC success story: roughly $200 million in revenue by 2023 and a $210 million Samsonite valuation in 2026.

Why This Matters

Most DTC brands treat the website as a checkout with branding on top. The brands that win treat it as media.

For a celebrity-founded brand, this is existential: the founder's name earns the click, but only the experience earns the customer. Social sells the dream; the site has to close the sale — communicating identity instantly, supporting discovery through content-rich pages, and converting high-consideration purchases on a phone screen.

BÉIS proves the formula. When the digital flagship matches the ambition of the brand, the ceiling disappears.