Having physical stores helps to unlock the essence of omnichannel retail, but not every multichannel offering is worth the investment, as a co-founder at Cotopaxi has shared with Digital Commerce 360.

Apparel and outdoor gear retailer Cotopaxi began as a digitally native brand about 12 years ago. Since then, it has expanded to physical retail and currently operates more than 20 locations. Over the years, Cotopaxi began to look at pilot and test various omnichannel offerings before ultimately deciding not to fully invest in the required technological and operational changes.

Stephan Jacob, chief global officer and a co-founder at Cotopaxi, told Digital Commerce 360 that the retailer tried fulfilling online orders from its physical stores.

“Our stores are relatively small — 1,200 square feet, on average,” he said. “There’s not a ton of physical space to run a fulfillment operation there.”

He said that although there’s value in exposing in-store inventory to “online demand and increased sell-through velocity,” it was still not enough to stick with. Cotopaxi decided the operational complexity that came with that store-based fulfillment was not worth it, he said. It had factored in space requirements, staff training, technological integration and inventory, he said. Currently, Cotopaxi fulfills only from its distribution center, he added.

Cotopaxi is No. 1,415 in the Top 2000 Database. The Top 2000 database is Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of the largest North American online retailers. Nordstrom ranks No. 21. Bloomingdale’s falls under parent company Macy’s, which ranks No. 18 in the Top 2000.

Cotopaxi omnichannel sales strategy

Jacob told Digital Commerce 360 that Cotopaxi’s sales were entirely direct-to-consumer at first. Around five or six years after its founding, the brand opened itself up to wholesale.

Wholesale “grew rapidly to over 50% of total sales,” Jacob said. “We’ve now brought it back to what we feel is a healthier level of wholesale being about 25%-30%, DTC the vast majority and then we have some corporate business, and international is a fast-growing channel.”

Cotopaxi also operates a mobile app that it has used to tie into outdoor adventure events, Jacob said. And that tied into physical stores, enhancing the omnichannel experience for Cotopaxi customers.

“That was an amazing way to have tens of thousands of people exposed to the brand in a very organic manner and then become raving brand fans,” Jacob said. “Physical activation through our stores and trigger events is a big part of our strategy. We obviously do the traditional performance marketing across all the big platforms and carefully measure, monitor with all the attribution challenges that comes with that.”

But over the years, Cotopaxi has tried what he called “opportunistic spending with high return.” That included how it used social media and search engine optimization, which he called “beneficial.”

With that came increasing costs.

“We, for several years, became a little addicted to chasing that growth and expending the dollars in order to drive top line,” Jacob said. “We’ve really pulled that back and have become a lot more mindful about how we’re spending and ensuring that the long-term benefit is there.”

Through experimenting, Cotopaxi also learned when to pull back from some omnichannel integrations, he said.

When not to chase omnichannel offerings

Jacob said Cotopaxi had, for a while, shown in-store inventory levels online. It also showed where consumers could engage with the brand physically, both in terms of its store locator and retail partners that sell its products.

“We’ve gone back and forth on this,” Jacob told Digital Commerce 360. “We invested several years ago into buy online, pick up in store [BOPIS], endless aisle, et cetera. It drove fine results, but it does add operational complexity. We’re still balancing what really adds value and drives significant volume for the customer, versus a buzzword to accommodate what’s currently en vogue in the industry. And so, in terms of in-store technology, we’ve experimented with a lot and have ultimately landed on being somewhat agnostic how the customer wants to engage with us.”

Most of Cotopaxi’s physical stores are in the western region of the United States, with less than a handful in the northeast. It also has several locations in Japan and South Korea.

Jacob said Cotopaxi uses those stores to drive traffic as it gets closer to shipping cutoff dates during key sales periods.

“But we also don’t have the full-country coverage like a Home Depot or something like that,” Jacob said. “We know that the vast majority of our consumers that engage with us online do not have a store in their immediate proximity. From that perspective, it’s not as crucial and critical just because the truest of the omnichannel — online-offline — opportunity is only available to a small subset of our customer base with the current store footprint that we have. ”

He said that’s why it has largely been an experiment. Cotopaxi has not gone all in with a full infrastructure investment into omnichannel, he said.

When Cotopaxi tested omnichannel offerings

Part of Cotopaxi’s omnichannel testing occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Top 1000 retailers adopted such features as BOPIS, curbside pickup and in-store stock status en masse.

Consistent across each year from 2021 through 2025, Retail Chains in the Top 1000 that offered any of those services had higher conversion rates than those that did not, on average, according to data in the 2026 edition of Digital Commerce 360’s Omnichannel Report.

“Where we did offer it, there was adoption, yes,” Jacob said. “But it didn’t change the four-wall economics of a store location by offering buy online, pick up in store. At the same time, it does increase complexity when it comes to pull-push planning, replenishment in store, et cetera, if you suddenly direct a ton of ecom demand into an individual store location that may not be ready for that.”

And that added operational complexity was not worth it, according to Jacob.

“The juice wasn’t worth the squeeze, essentially,” Jacob said. “And so we folded some of these initiatives. I’m not saying it doesn’t make sense. It depends on size, scale and geographic coverage, but that was our experience back then.”

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