From 120+ Stores to 4 Websites: How Bardot Rebuilt the In-Store Experience Online

About Bardot

Founded in 1996 in Melbourne, Bardot is one of Australia’s most iconic fashion brands. After closing all 72 retail stores in 2019, the company relaunched as a pure-play online retailer in 2020, now shipping globally to over 60 countries. With its children’s line Bardot Junior, the brand operates four ecommerce sites across Australia and the United States, and is stocked at many retailers including Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s, David Jones, and The Iconic.

From 120+ stores to four websites - and no one to greet the customer

Like many fashion brands that moved from physical retail to pure-play ecommerce, Bardot lost more than square footage when it closed its stores. It lost the fitting room conversation, the checkout-counter save, the store associate who could read a hesitant shopper and offer the right nudge at the right moment. All of that now had to happen on the website.

The challenge was compounded by scale: Bardot doesn’t run one site, it runs four - spanning two brands (Bardot and Junior) across two markets servicing the globe (Australia and the United States). Each site has its own audience, its own commercial calendar, and its own mobile-heavy traffic profile.

The team also faced a tension familiar to any premium brand: how do you recover abandoning visitors and grow your email list without cheapening the shopping experience? A discount popup that feels aggressive or poorly timed can do more damage than a missed conversion.

Use cases

1. Recovering abandoning visitors across multiple storefronts

Every pure-play retailer bleeds traffic. Visitors browse, compare, and leave - often with intent to return, but frequently without doing so. For Bardot, this is amplified across four sites: a visitor lost on Bardot AU is a different recovery problem than one lost on Bardot Junior USA.

Bardot’s approach is to intercept departing visitors with a restrained exit-intent offer - a discount that only surfaces when someone is genuinely about to leave, never during active browsing. What makes this scalable is the multi-site architecture: the same recovery strategy is built once and deployed across all four storefronts from a single Wisepops workspace. The creative and offer adapt per brand, but the logic, targeting, and management overhead stay centralized. One person maintains what would otherwise require four separate campaign builds.

2. Growing the membership base on mobile

With mobile dominating Bardot’s traffic, list building had to be designed for thumbs. Rather than resizing desktop campaigns for smaller screens, the team built mobile-native membership campaigns from scratch - full-screen layouts, touch-friendly CTAs, and concise messaging that respects how people actually browse fashion on their phones.

They also used A/B testing to refine every detail. During Black Friday 2025 - their highest-stakes week - the team ran an A/B test on the mobile membership signup for Bardot AU. Variant A, with a bolder layout and tighter copy, nearly doubled the CTR of Variant B (15.7% vs 9.0%).

On a different test for the Bardot Junior USA mobile signup, a redesigned Variant B outperformed the original by 75%. These aren’t hypothetical gains: across 19 A/B tests on membership, seasonal, and exit-intent campaigns, Bardot has built a culture of testing everything - placement, creative, timing - and scaling the winner.

3. Coordinating seasonal moments across the portfolio

Black Friday, product launches, geolocalized campaigns, and seasonal offers need to feel unified across all four sites while still being relevant to each audience. A countdown bar announcing Black Friday runs simultaneously across Junior AU, and Bardot/Junior USA - creating a coordinated commercial moment from a single campaign setup.

For product-specific launches like the "Secret Weapons" collection, targeted popups reach the right shoppers on the right site. Here are a few examples.

The persistent, non-intrusive nature of countdown bars makes them especially effective here: they build urgency throughout the browsing session without interrupting the shopping flow, and they scale to any number of sites without additional effort:

What's next

Bardot’s activation program continues to evolve. The next phase includes expanding into embedded recommendations within product and category pages, exploring web push notifications for re-engaging visitors who browsed but didn’t buy, and building branching quiz campaigns to help shoppers find the right product faster - especially on mobile, where browsing is high but navigation patience is low.

Bardot's onsite activation program continues to grow. In July 2026, the team will be launching a fifth website, Bardot EU, shortly followed by a sixth, Bardot Junior EU, to complete seasonally relevant coverage and content across the globe. All managed from the same centralized Australian-based team using Wisepops.