How Boyne Country Sports Nearly Doubled Gross Profit During BFCM Using Shopify AI Merchandising

Why Manual Merchandising Breaks During BFCM

Boyne Country Sports faced a challenge many enterprise brands encounter during Black Friday and the holiday season:

• Having their top collections dominated on peak traffic days by the wrong products.
  

Those low-margin items, over-discounted products, or items that no longer matched shopper demand — or their seasonal profit goals. They needed a solution that would not only help them automate their collections, but help push revenue and profit!

Here’s a Shopify merchandising case study on exactly how they did it!

About Boyne Country Sports

Rooted in the Boyne Resorts family, Boyne Country Sports is a specialty outdoor and lifestyle retailer selling high-quality gear, apparel, and expert advice for skiing, snowboarding, golf, and year-round adventure activities.

They have grown from a small mountain shop in northern Michigan into a trusted retail destination with multiple locations and an integrated role in the Boyne Resorts experience.

But with big growth comes big merchandising challenges.

The Shopify BFCM Merchandising Challenge

Without automation, Boyne Country Sports had to manually fix their collection orders during peak traffic, which was not only time consuming, but: it made it very difficult to protect margins while still driving revenue.

This becomes unsustainable during BFCM, because manual merchandising can’t keep up with the pace. Teams are forced to constantly drag products, adjust tags, or reorder collections while:

• Traffic is at its highest
  

• Teams are at their busiest
  

• And mistakes are at their costliest
  

For brands like Boyne Country Sports with a catalog of 20,000+ products, the problem compounds:

• The more products you have, the harder it becomes to understand which ones should be prioritized right now.
  

So, Boyne Country Sports needed a solution to help them drastically reduce manual workload, while also helping to increase revenue and overall profitability. A solution that would help them to capitalize on peak traffic (and shopping) during BFCM and the holiday shopping season.

That solution was Kimonix.

An AI-Driven Merchandising Solution

During the peak holiday season, Boyne Country Sports optimized product discovery and Shopify BFCM merchandising with Kimonix’s AI-managed collections.

With their Shopify store already optimized for peak traffic and performance by Roswell, the focus shifted to making sure that traffic was being directed toward the right products at the right time. Kimonix added a real-time merchandising layer that continuously reordered collections based on live performance signals.

This ensured shoppers always saw what was actually converting and contributing to profit in that moment.

And because Kimonix works directly inside Shopify, the solution was quick to implement and easy to manage — even during the most intense sales period of the year.

Powerful tools, easy integration & excellent support

 — Thomas Phillips, VP of eCommerce, Boyne Country Sports

Thanks to Kimonix’s:

1. Real-time sorting that replaced manual dragging
   

2. Ability to automatically prioritize high-margin products  
   

3. Dynamic collection sorting that adapts to BFCM condition changes
   

4. And a system that can handle the complexity of having 50+ SKUs (that manual rules can’t!)
   

…Boyne Country Sports was able to solve the biggest merchandising struggles Shopify stores face during peak shopping season, while reducing margin erosion during heavy promo periods.

And the gains?

The Results

During the BFCM and holiday peak, Boyne Country’s revenue from Kimonix-managed collections increased by 121%, growing from 13.29% to 29.38% of total store revenue. This means that nearly one in every three dollars spent during this period came from collections powered by Kimonix.

At the same time, gross profit contribution from Kimonix collections nearly doubled, proving the impact extended beyond revenue to sustained profitability.

*Performance compared month over month: pre-BFCM vs. BFCM and holiday peak.

Let’s look at each of the outcomes of these results a little more closely.

Revenue Impact

Kimonix-managed collections became one of Boyne Country Sports’ primary revenue drivers during BFCM, not just a supporting channel. As peak traffic increased, more shoppers were guided to the products most likely to convert, resulting in a much larger share of total sales coming from optimized collections rather than manual merchandising.

Profit Gains

Boyne Country Sports didn’t just sell more during BFCM — they sold better. Their Shopify AI merchandising collections prioritized products that protected margin, during a period that normally forces retailers to sacrifice profitability.

This can lead to excess inventory that ties up capital and increases risk.

We are locked in and ready to go for Black Friday/Cyber Monday and confident with our merchandising strategy. We are very happy with what Kimonix has allowed us to do in this sales period!

— Thomas Phillips, VP of eCommerce, Boyne Country Sports