Industrie: eCommerce

Cold Culture is a Spanish streetwear brand built on drops. They release new collections weekly (sometimes twice a week), build anticipation through social media countdowns 48 hours before each drop, and rely on a community approaching one million followers to sell through inventory fast. 

Their audience is 16 to 30 year olds who live on their phones – not in their email inboxes. The app gave them a direct line to those customers that doesn’t depend on email open rates or ad spend.

Keep reading to learn how MobiLoud helped them launch the perfect new channel for their brand.

Snapshot

Vertical: Fashion / Streetwear

Platform: Shopify

Market: Spain/Europe

Key Metrics:

• 250,000+ downloads without active promotion
• App revenue beat expectations by 300%
• Higher conversion rate in app vs mobile web

Business Impact:

• App is now a core sales channel alongside web
• Push notifications replacing email as the primary way to announce drops
• Custom app-only layout designed for impulse purchasing

“More than needing reasons to have an app, I ask ‘why not’. It’s more accessible, it adds and doesn’t subtract anything from your business.”
— Erik Asensio, 4sens Agency (Cold Culture’s digital partner)

The Roadblock

Cold Culture’s business runs on urgency. A new drop goes live, the community needs to know immediately, and the window to buy is short. 

The brand had an urgency engine running on social media and email marketing, but email had a ceiling.

Their audience is 16 to 30 year olds. As Erik Asensio, who runs Cold Culture’s digital strategy through his agency 4sens, put it: how many of them are actually checking their email regularly?

He realized that their audience at best checked their email a couple of times a day. And even among those people, their emails were getting lost among the dozens of other emails showing up in the inbox from other brands.

Cold Culture needed a channel that could reach their most engaged customers instantly, with near-guaranteed visibility. And they needed it to double as a sales channel, not just a notification tool.

The web store was performing well, but mobile traffic made up the bulk of their visits, and they found there was friction between seeing a notification and completing a purchase: opening a browser, navigating to the store, finding the new drop, adding to cart. 

Every extra step costs conversions, especially with a young audience making impulse purchases.

That’s what they had to fix.

Why They Chose MobiLoud

Cold Culture’s team is lean. Erik runs the digital strategy as an independent agency. They didn’t have the resources or desire to build and maintain a separate native app from scratch.

MobiLoud provided the perfect solution. We helped them launch a native app built on their existing Shopify store, but with the flexibility to customize the app experience independently from the web. 

That distinction mattered.

Working with Diego and the MobiLoud team, Cold Culture built a custom app layout that’s different from their website. 

They stripped out elements designed for browsing and brand discovery, the kind of content that makes sense on the web, and replaced it with a layout built for buying.

“When someone installs your app, it’s because you’ve done all the right things and you’ve finally achieved the goal of being part of someone’s phone. That someone has a part of their phone dedicated to you. And I think that means you’ve captured the client 100%. Nobody installs an app out of doubt, to see if I like the clothes. You do that on the website.”

That insight shaped their entire app strategy. The app isn’t a copy of the website. It’s a sales channel for people who already know and love the brand.

What we provided them wasn’t just a website in a box. It was a dedicated new channel – without the baggage and overhead that usually comes with launching a separate native app.

Launch & Results

There were no worries when it came to adoption.

Cold Culture reached 250,000 downloads without running any dedicated app promotion campaigns. People found it on their own.

“With 250,000 downloads without promoting it… it gives you a presence as a brand that makes you more professional.”

Once the app had traction, the revenue followed. Erik added that Q4 app revenue exceeded their expectations by 300%.

“In the last quarter, it has exceeded by 300%. We were expecting maybe [a fraction] of what we billed from the app, without giving it any promotion, without working so hard because we just launched that channel.”

A streamlined purchase experience

The app’s homepage skips the standard ecommerce layout entirely. Instead of sliders, banners, and category navigation, the app lands on New Arrivals. 

The product page has been stripped down too: carousels and cross-sell recommendations removed, all in service of what Erik calls the “sell-off,” the impulse to buy.

“In two clicks you have the purchase done. The worst case there will be three clicks: enter the product, add to cart, and finish the purchase.”

Push notifications as the primary drop channel

Push notifications are becoming Cold Culture’s go-to channel for drop announcements. For an audience that doesn’t reliably check email, push is a direct line to their phone at the exact moment a drop goes live.

They’re also using MobiLoud’s ability to send push notifications by market, timing sends for different countries so they hit at the optimal hour rather than competing with other brands in the same window.

What’s next

Cold Culture has a clear roadmap for the app:

• Early access drops. App users get new collections one hour before they go live on the web. This is planned for their next release.
• App-exclusive drops. Collections that are only available through the app.
• App-only pricing. A small discount (around 3%) for purchasing through the app.
• Welcome flows. Push notification sequences for new app users to drive initial conversion.

The app has already been a huge success, without any active promotion. Now that they’re starting to invest heavier into the app, Erik sees big things on the horizon.

“Our goal for Q3 and Q4 of 2026, we are going to make it very difficult [for competitors] because we are going hard with the app.”

The Takeaway

Cold Culture’s case is a clear example of what happens when a brand with an engaged community gives that community a native app.

The app isn’t a duplicate of the website. It’s a stripped-down, impulse-optimized sales channel that reaches customers through push instead of email, and it’s already driving a meaningful amount in monthly revenue.

Erik’s summary of why any brand should have an app is hard to argue with. He says: “why not?” It only adds to your business. He sees few reasons why a brand wouldn’t want to add a new sales channel like a mobile app (especially when MobiLoud makes it so easy and cost-effective to launch).

If you run a brand with an engaged audience of mobile-first shoppers, it makes little sense not to have an app.

Get in touch with us and we’ll show you how easy it can be to launch.

Book a free strategy call and we’ll show you a custom app preview, walk you through the process, and lay out what a mobile app can do for your business.

Rainbow Apparel is a fashion retailer with over 1,200 stores across the US, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, plus an online presence at rainbowshops.com. Like many retailers, they have their own mobile apps as well, though this hasn’t been without issues.

Rainbow experimented with several versions of an app, running into significant issues finding a Shopify app builder that fit. They eventually came across MobiLoud, who were able to provide the stability and functionality a retailer of their size needed – all for next to no investment.

What They Wanted: A Mobile App Experience Equal to the Web Experience

We talked to David Cost, VP of Ecommerce and Marketing at Rainbow, about what their goals were from their mobile app.

The big takeaway was that they didn’t need to reinvent the wheel. Their mobile website worked great, but some customers preferred to shop on an app.

“In our experience, users break into two camps. There are users who prefer to buy on the app and users who prefer using the browser. You can’t convince one to go the other way, you need to meet them where they are.”

The goal of the app was an experience at least as good as what they had on the web, so that the significant segment of their customer base who preferred to use an app would not be let down.

“Our apps never had any functionality or usability beyond the web experience. The reason to have an app is not to have something that isn’t on the website, but for people who prefer that way to access Rainbow content.”

Trial and Error with Native, Hybrid and Wrapper Apps

Rainbow launched their first app seven years ago. They’ve had several variants, having to move on from each because of various reasons.

“MobiLoud is the fourth app vendor that we’ve had, so we’ve experienced the plus and minuses of the native, hybrid and wrapper approaches to apps.”

Native was first – but the cost to maintain a native app proved to be too much.

They found what appeared to be a good solution, with an app wrapper – only to cause issues when they migrated their website to a new platform.

“We were working with another wrapper app provider, but we moved from Salesforce to Shopify, their solution stopped working and they were never able to solve it.”

The next step was to use a Shopify app builder to create a hybrid app, utilizing the Shopify API to pull all the key details from their site. Ultimately this couldn’t replicate the same level of user experience as their website.

“The hybrid solutions on top of Shopify are just too limited. The Shopify API only enables certain things and all the major providers of hybrid apps for Shopify had limitations that the Shopify API would not let them get around.”

They lost a year trying to get around this issue and launch an app that recreated their website, only to find it wouldn’t be possible with a hybrid app.

The wrapper approach seemed to be the best bet, being easy to maintain and easy to recreate their website experience. But they needed a proven, reliable tool that could do this for their Shopify website.

Finding a Proven Solution

At first David and his team struggled to find a tool that built wrapper apps for Shopify stores, until he came across MobiLoud.

“We started searching for a wrapper solution that works with Shopify websites, you were literally the only ones that came up. Somebody else was suggested but when we asked them the questions of giving us an example of a Shopify store they couldn’t, which you could.”

With thousands of successful apps launched, they could see examples of similar apps that use MobiLoud to launch mobile apps, like fellow fashion retailer John Varvatos.

“You were able to show us the John Varvatos app, and it worked in the way we expected.”

That was enough to convince David to see what MobiLoud could do for them.

Why MobiLoud Was the Best Option

So how did MobiLoud provide the perfect solution for Rainbow Apparel? David highlighted four reasons.

Recreating Their Website in the App

“The app needs to be at least as functional as the website. It doesn’t need to be better than the website, but the user experience can’t be worse.”

This is the issue that they ran into with other providers. Seemingly minor custom features coded on their website couldn’t be carried over to the app. Yet these customizations, such as ordering product collections a specific way, had a more dramatic effect on conversion rate than many realize.

Not being able to do the same on the app would be a dealbreaker. MobiLoud was the only one who could do this.

Push Notifications

“The power of push notifications is so strong. In a world where people open email less and less each day, everyone is jumping into SMS which is crazy expensive, and people are starting to tune these out too, being able to do push notifications is the reason you do an app.”

Building an app with MobiLoud let them access this extremely powerful communication channel, which in itself is worth investing in the app.

“Push notifications are the cheapest and most powerful communication channel we have. We find that users who prefer to interact via an app are more loyal, buy from us more often and spend more time with our content.”

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Maintenance

“Before we had web, iOS and Android apps. That would be 3 different things to maintain. With the wrapper approach, we have the best of both worlds, and stop having to maintain a third platform.”

MobiLoud’s wrapper app approach is extremely cheap and easy to maintain, without the added complexity of juggling multiple platforms.

“If we had unlimited time and money, we would probably go for a custom native app, but that is half a million to a million a year to maintain.”

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Price

“The expense isn’t that big, and operationally, there’s not that much we have to do for the app. It’s a no-brainer, especially when you add push notifications on top.”

The price of building an app with MobiLoud, for a retailer of Rainbow’s size and who do as much business as they do through the app, was so minor there was zero risk to try it out.

“You’re essentially offering an app for free. Your price is so low, you’re a fool not to try an app.”

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After 7 Years and 4 App Builds, Rainbow Launched the Perfect App

After a long journey, Rainbow found a reliable, stable option that let them do everything they needed in an app.

“My team is thrilled because we have functioning apps that require almost no effort on our part. It is a brilliant solution. For someone that wants to see the impact an app has on a business, MobiLoud is the single best way to make that happen.”

Better yet, along with being cheaper and easier, their MobiLoud app build is actually delivering better results than their previous app.

“We have seen our conversion rate increasing when we moved from our hybrid app to MobiLoud.”

The seamless user experience between web and mobile is a winner with Rainbow customers, which makes it a winner with the Rainbow Apparel team as well.

Rainbow Shops is just one of thousands of examples of successful apps launched with MobiLoud. Whether you run an ecommerce store, a news site, forum or any other type of online business, if you’ve been thinking about converting your site to a mobile app, there’s never been a better time to do it.

MobiLoud makes the entire process simple and affordable. Just book a personalized demo to have one of our app experts walk it through for you.

For Wisconsin-based company Canine P4, serving large-scale dog breeders with diagnostic equipment and supplies, their mobile app was a key channel for customer relationships.

It helped them connect with their most loyal customers and build relationships, which is crucial for a B2B brand such as theirs.

But the original app took a little too much work to manage. They were looking for a simpler solution that would let them streamline how they managed their website and app. They got that, with MobiLoud.

Snapshot

Vertical: Veterinary Diagnostics & Breeding Supplies

Platform: Shopify

Business Impact:

• Simplified operations by syncing their website and app
• Improved customer engagement via push notifications
• Decreased workload without increasing costs

“The support is very responsive, very motivated, they take initiative on things, which in my experience is not a characteristic of support guys. So bravo on that. It’s pretty impressive and makes it quite a bit easier.”

– Micah Decker, Marketing and Customer Service Lead, Canine P4

The Roadblock

With the site built on Shopify, Micah and the team originally used another popular Shopify app builder to launch their app.

While it worked, the app was limited, and came with too much overhead for their team, who are focused more on selling products than maintaining tech.

Their first provider offered little support, and every update meant double the work: maintaining both the website and the app separately. 

Why They Chose MobiLoud

MobiLoud made it so much easier to manage their app. It would update automatically in line with their website, ensuring they always had a consistent user experience across website and app, with less work needed from their side.

“The price was very similar between you and them, but they had no support. You guys have been very, very helpful all the way through.”

Our streamlined approach brought them in. But our attention to support proved to be the biggest differentiating factor between us and other app builders (including their previous tool).

Launch & Results

The mobile app is a key asset for Canine P4. Their kind of business relies on relationships, and apps are one of the best ways to build and nurture close business relationships with your top customers.

“Once they have the app, it’s a lot easier to interact with us and for us with them. So it’s almost like a self-selected VIP program. You know, they take the action of downloading the app, they commit to you by doing that, you have better access to them, they have better access to you.”

MobiLoud helped Canine P4 launch a new app, one that maintained that close touchpoint they desired, but with less legwork to maintain.

Importantly, we let them relaunch without a huge investment in time or money, and without having to manually switch users to the new app.

They maintained their existing app store listings, their reviews, their users –  we just shipped the new, improved app as an update, with zero friction for their customers.

The Takeaway

Mobile apps are a great channel for businesses built on relationships.

But for companies with lean technical teams, the maintenance required to manage two separate platforms and keep everything consistent and in sync is often too much.

MobiLoud removes this handcuff. With your site and website automatically synced, your app runs basically on autopilot. The content, design, functionality is always in line with your site, with no extra work needed.

Our commitment to service is the cherry on top – we actively work with you to ensure your app is a success.

If you want to launch a new, personal channel for your best customers, get in touch with the MobiLoud team. See what your app could look like with a free preview now.

Festival-fashion brand Freedom Rave Wear’s first mobile app was confined to a template. But their business model was far from standard.

Each week, they drop 200-400 new products, manufacturing on-demand and shipping within 24 hours. This high-velocity business model demanded a unique app experience to match.

“Our constant flow of new releases gives customers endless reasons to shop with us. It’s all about keeping the momentum alive and ensuring there’s always something fresh to discover.”

See how MobiLoud helped them do it; 10Xing their flexibility while slashing operational lift at the same time.

Snapshot

Vertical: Festival fashion & accessories

Platform: Shopify

Key Metrics: 

• 62% higher conversion rate vs mobile web
• 6x higher revenue per app user
• 10% higher AOV
• 5.75x sessions per app user
• 20-30% of revenue through the app

Business Impact:

• No third-party integration limits
• Integrated their resale subdomain & improved discoverability for their loyalty program
• Reduced maintenance burden and operational lift for the app

“Innovation is at the heart of everything we do, and our mobile app reflects that. It keeps up with our fast-paced operations and helps drive the results we need.”
– Michael Hodgen, CEO, Freedom Rave Wear

The Roadblock

Freedom Rave Wear’s first app (built with a popular Shopify app builder) looked decent enough. It was a core part of their business, but rising operational headaches and limitations had them looking for a new solution.

The block and template-based approach was too limiting. 

Custom features from their website wouldn’t work in the app. Some essential Shopify apps they used on the website couldn’t be integrated in the app, either because they weren’t supported, or because of integration limits on their plan.

On top of that, it was becoming more and more work to manage.

Every website update meant a corresponding app update. New banners had to be configured twice. Collection launches required double the setup time. This was duplicate work they’d prefer to avoid.

Why They Switched to MobiLoud

MobiLoud’s approach was different. Instead of squeezing their unique business into a pre-defined template, we gave them complete flexibility.

Their mobile app would reflect their website 100%. Everything they’d built for the web would transfer to the app, with no limitations.

The app featured:

•    Instant product launches across all platforms
•    Seamless integration with push notifications
•    Custom features preserved without rebuilding
•    A single platform to maintain

Not only were they able to execute their exact vision in the app, but they did it with significantly less overhead.

Launch & Results

Their app remains a crucial part of their high-velocity business model. It drives 20-30% of their revenue, plus major lifts in key metrics over their mobile website:

• 62% higher conversion rate
• 6x higher revenue per app user
• 10% higher AOV
• 5.75x sessions per app user

Launching hundreds of new products each week comes with a lot of moving parts.

MobiLoud streamlined a significant area of complexity, giving them a unified web and app experience they don’t have to think about. 

The Takeaway

Fast-moving, modern ecom brands like Freedom Rave Wear need mobile apps to align with how modern customers shop. But many solutions drown you in busywork just keeping everything in sync.

MobiLoud makes it easier – and doesn’t ask you to sacrifice the features that make your brand unique.

If you’re ready to build a better app experience, get in touch. Get a free preview of your app to see what’s possible with MobiLoud.

When your website becomes your third-best performing store out of seven locations, your mobile experience needs to keep up. The Pants Store, a 74-year-old retail institution, found a way to match their explosive digital growth while eliminating mobile app maintenance.

Key Takeaways:

• Maintaining 38,000 app subscribers
• Eliminated 15-20 minutes of weekly manual updates
• Preserved all website features in mobile
• Automated promotional content updates
• Unified digital experience across channels

A Legacy of Growth

Michael Gee, owner of The Pants Store, said:

“We’ve been around for 74 years and our name carries weight.”

With six brick-and-mortar locations and a booming digital business, they’ve successfully bridged traditional retail with modern commerce.

The pandemic accelerated their digital transformation. Michael explains:

“Our website is really taking off. PantsStore.com tears it up – it’s become our third best location if you count it alongside our six brick-and-mortar stores.”

The Hidden Cost of Success

Despite their website’s success, maintaining their old mobile app became a burden. Michael explains:

“The app pulls everything from the website but we still have to manually update pictures and promotions.”

Even with an efficient process, someone spent 15-20 minutes every week updating seasonal imagery and promotional content in their app builder’s interface.

With 38,000 app subscribers, the potential was clear. Michael acknowledges:

“The app has potential, we just need someone to help guide us on how to make the most of it.”

Automating the Mobile Experience

Working with MobiLoud, The Pants Store found a way to eliminate manual updates while preserving their mobile reach. Their website and app became one unified experience – when they update their website, changes appear instantly in the app.

The transition was seamless: their 38,000 subscribers kept the app with an automatic overnight update. No redownloads, no disruption, no confusion. All the manual work that had been holding them back simply disappeared.

Digital Integration Done Right

For a retail institution that successfully navigated digital transformation, having the right mobile strategy proved crucial. Now every website update, promotion, and feature appears instantly in their app – no extra work required.

Michael had noted of their old system:

“Someone spends about 15-20 minutes a week updating the app. It’s not a huge time investment, but it’s just not our focus.”

Now that time can go toward growing their booming digital business instead of maintaining separate platforms.

Looking Forward

The Pants Store has built something special – a website that outperforms most of their physical locations. Their mobile experience now matches this success, delivering all the benefits of modern commerce without the traditional maintenance overhead.

For a business that’s thrived for 74 years by adapting to change, this approach to mobile ensures they’re ready for whatever comes next.

Curious about launching a mobile app for your brand like The Pants Store?

Get started with a free preview and see your store transformed into an app with:

• Automatic content syncing
• Zero manual updates
• Complete feature parity

We can have it ready in as little as 24 hours – no technical work or commitment required.