How Oliver Cabell Drove 15% in Sales and Saved $1000s Per Month with Bundles

Key takeaways

• 15% of total sales now come from bundled products within just two weeks of launch—without any paid marketing.
• 40+ hours saved per month by automating SKU conversions, returns processing, and refund tracking.
• Eliminated SKU mismatches and fulfillment errors, ensuring seamless returns and inventory accuracy across Shopify, CIN7, their warehouse, and Loop Returns.

For Ben Hedlund, Vice President of Sales & Operations at Oliver Cabell, product innovation is key to the brand’s success. 

Since its founding in 2017, Oliver Cabell, a Shopify Plus brand with physical store locations in New York and Los Angeles, has built a strong following in the fashion-lifestyle sneaker market, offering high quality shoes at an accessible price point.

But as the brand evolved, so did its mission—moving beyond aesthetics to incorporate comfort-driven innovations like orthotic insoles and post-workout recovery shoes.

While launching an insole was simple, selling the story behind it was not.

“Selling a story around a shoe is one thing, but selling a story around just an insole? That’s just not quite as interesting to our market,” said Ben.

Rather than offering insoles as a standalone product, Ben and his team saw an opportunity: bundle them with their best-selling shoes, creating an orthopedic-friendly version of each style. This approach allowed them to test demand, optimize product positioning, and refine their inventory strategy before committing stock.

But the team quickly ran into challenges with their backend systems—SKU misalignment, fulfillment errors, and costly operational inefficiencies that made managing bundles more complex than anticipated.

To make bundling work at scale, they needed a solution that wouldn’t break their backend. 

That’s where Simple Bundles came in.

Let’s talk about the solution they created that ended up driving 15% of total sales from bundled products as well as saving 40+ hours per month by reducing backend issues.

The challenges: bundles that weren’t built to scale

Before using Simple Bundles, Oliver Cabell found challenges in keeping bundles organized across their backend systems. Their existing ERP, CIN7, had a BOM (Bill of Materials) feature that was supposed to help with bundling, but it quickly became clear that it wasn’t scalable.

Ben explained how they “used another bundles app years ago, but when we implemented CIN7’s BOM feature for our kits and bundles, it was just super problematic.”

Instead of simplifying the process, the system created fulfillment bottlenecks, making it difficult to maintain accurate inventory and process orders efficiently. This led to three core issues:

Bottleneck #1: SKU chaos and return nightmares

Because Oliver Cabell sold products with overlapping sizes—like a shoe that could be both a women’s size 10 and a men’s size 7—their inventory system and warehouse used a single SKU for those styles; whilst Shopify required them to have different SKUs.

However, this created major issues with returns and fulfillment.

When customers returned products, the SKU mismatches caused errors in Loop Returns and their warehouse, leading to failed return processing and additional labor costs to manually fix issues.

“When a product is returned on an order that contains one of those crossover styles, we’ve had to do an appendage like ‘-W’ for women’s or whatever, and it’s not recognized by our warehouse,” Ben explained.

Without a solution, the team risked ongoing fulfillment issues, inaccurate reporting, and wasted operational time sorting out SKU conflicts.

Bottleneck #2: Refund disasters in Oliver Cabell’s New York and Los Angeles retail locations

Beyond their ecommerce sales, Oliver Cabell also sold through LEAP Retail’s POS system in physical stores, which added another layer of complexity. 

Occasionally, store associates processed refunds incorrectly, causing order mismatches in Shopify.

With no clear way to track what happened, resolving refund discrepancies was difficult.

Bottleneck #3: Testing new products without the inventory risk

While the team knew there was demand for orthotic-friendly shoes, they didn’t want to commit inventory upfront without validating how well these bundles would sell.

“We wanted to explore ways that we could treat the insoles as if they were their own line of products, each having their own PDP, and really see the response that we’d be getting,” Ben shared.

Rather than just selling insoles separately, they saw an opportunity to bundle them with their most popular shoes—offering the same styles, but with a built-in orthopedic option.

To make this work, they needed a solution that would allow them to create dedicated PDPs for the orthotic versions of their top 30 bestsellers—without breaking their backend systems. They also needed to ensure that bundled SKUs would sync correctly across Shopify, CIN7, their 3PL, and their returns platform to avoid costly manual work and fulfillment issues.

Ultimately, Oliver Cabell needed a bundling solution that would allow them to:

• Ensure seamless fulfillment and returns across all systems.
• Avoid SKU conflicts and manual intervention in their backend operations.
• Test demand quickly before committing inventory.

This is where Simple Bundles made all the difference.

The Solution: How Simple Bundles Simplified Complexity into Profit

To scale their orthotic-friendly shoe bundles without breaking their backend systems, Oliver Cabell needed a bundling solution that would:

• Create seamless PDPs for their bundled shoes and insoles without requiring separate inventory.
• Ensure SKU alignment across Shopify, their ERP (CIN7), warehouse, and returns system to eliminate errors.
• Enable fast iteration and testing before committing inventory.

Simple Bundles provided the flexibility and automation they needed, solving their operational challenges while allowing them to rapidly scale bundles across their best-selling styles.

Fix #1: Automated SKU conversion, fulfillment, and returns

One of the biggest challenges with bundles and returns is ensuring that every system—Shopify, ERP, fulfillment center, and returns apps like Loop—understands exactly what’s being returned.

Before Simple Bundles, SKU misalignment caused major fulfillment and return headaches. 

With Simple Bundles, bundled products are processed at the component SKU level rather than as a single, uneditable bundle SKU. This means bundled SKUs are automatically converted into individual component SKUs at checkout, ensuring every system—from Shopify to their warehouse—receives the right data.

“By the time the order is being fulfilled and passed to our ERP and then to our warehouse, it’s showing the correct SKU,” said Ben. “Simple Bundles converts the bundle SKU into the individual products at checkout, so that’s what Loop sees, that’s what the ERP sees, and that’s what our warehouse sees. It’s all aligned across all systems.”

With SKU alignment in place, the team eliminated:

• Phantom returns that their warehouse couldn’t recognize.
• Manual labor costs tied to SKU mismatches.
• Order fulfillment errors caused by incorrect SKU mapping.

“We don’t see those errors happening where you have these phantom returns that the warehouse can’t identify, and then you have to spend man-hours sorting it out. It’s a game-changer for our data quality.” 
— Ben Hedlund

Fix #2: No more refund headaches in-store

With physical retail sales, POS refund mismatches were a major pain point—until Simple Bundles’ detailed order tracking and tagging system made it easy to trace every step of a transaction.

“It created a new order, highlighted and tagged the original order, put notes on why it did that—all very verbose and in a great clear way,” explained Ben.

In other words, Simple Bundles’ detailed documentation and tagging system made it easy to trace every step of an order. This saved the team time, prevented financial losses, and improved their ability to troubleshoot issues quickly.

Now, when the team needs to:

• Find affected orders from a POS refund,
• Sort and filter order history for audits,
• Troubleshoot fulfillment issues,

—everything is clearly documented and searchable.

This reduced time spent resolving order discrepancies and provided a transparent system for tracking refunds, order edits, and fulfillment status.

“What I discovered, which just put a smile on my face, was how well Simple Bundles documents everything they’re doing.”
— Ben Hedlund

Fix #3: A faster way to test and scale

To test demand for their orthotic-friendly shoe bundles, the team needed a way to:

• Quickly create dedicated PDPs for their bundled shoes + insoles.
• Optimize product pages without disrupting backend systems.
• Rapidly iterate on bundle offerings before committing inventory.

With Simple Bundles’ bulk import/export functionality, the team was able to launch 30+ orthotic shoe bundles in a fraction of the time it would’ve taken manually.

As Ben shared: “I knew it was possible to do what I wanted, which was create a dedicated SKU and PDP for the orthotic version of our top 30 bestsellers, test that, and see how it went before we start inventorying that—or if we even need to inventory it.”

This allowed them to validate demand for the orthotic versions of their shoes without upfront inventory risk—saving both time and costs while maximizing sales potential.

The results: more sales, less work, big savings

With Simple Bundles, Oliver Cabell successfully launched and scaled their orthotic-friendly shoe bundles—without breaking their backend operations.

• 15% of total sales now come from bundled products within just two weeks of launch—100% organic, with NO paid marketing.
• 40+ hours saved per month by eliminating manual fixes for SKU mismatches, returns, and fulfillment errors, saving $1000s in operational costs.
• Faster testing & iteration on new product bundles, allowing the team to optimize before committing inventory.
• Seamless alignment across all systems—Shopify, ERP, warehouse, and returns apps—ensuring smooth order processing and data accuracy.

“Being able to use the systems we have in a smarter way is a no-brainer. It’s something I’m exploring doing for all these interstitial sizes to make it way smoother, and then that allows us to use the proper barcodes.”
— Ben Hedlund

Simple Bundles streamlined sales across all channels

Once Oliver Cabell’s bundles were optimized for fulfillment and returns, they took it a step further—ensuring these improvements translated across all their sales channels.

By integrating Simple Bundles into their workflow, Oliver Cabell was able to:

• Sell bundled products seamlessly across Shopify, Shop App, and physical retail stores.
• Ensure accurate inventory sync between their website and in-store sales via POS.

With these improvements, Oliver Cabell created a consistent, scalable, and profitable bundling strategy across all channels—whether customers were shopping in-store, online, or via the Shop App.

With Simple Bundles, brands can provide their customers an unparalleled level of customization and choice, making their shopping experience truly unique.

Install Simple Bundles for FREE on the Shopify app store.