Results snapshot
- Reduced staff turnover from 130%+ to 75%
- Rolled Zipline out across 66 stores and 1,300 retail staff
- Consolidated 6+ tools into one source of truth
- Named 2025 Retail Employer of the Year
For streetwear retailer Footasylum, connecting with customers and online audiences comes second nature. Founded in 2005, the sportswear brand is a widely recognized name among young, culturally engaged consumers in the UK.
With millions of social media followers on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, and over a billion organic views online, Footasylum embodies what it means to speak their customers’ language. Despite this online success, internally, the brand knew it needed to sharpen their store communications and operations.
With 1,300 members of staff across 66 store locations in the UK, Footasylum was searching for a way to communicate and empower their own people with the same energy they brought to their digital strategy.
On the inside, Footasylum’s goal was clear: they needed more visibility into task execution, more consistent delivery of priorities across locations, and a single source of truth. That meant putting an end to the platform sprawl that was fragmenting their communications. And, with staff turnover sitting at 130%, employee engagement was another piece of the puzzle Footasylum were keen to address.
To solve these challenges, Footasylum turned to Zipline’s all-in-one communications and task management platform.
They needed to:
- Replace fragmented communications across 6+ platforms with a single source of truth
- Reduce message dilution across management layers
- Foster manager consistency across locations
- Free managers from back office admin
- Improve frontline engagement and reduce staff turnover
The communication gap: Messages lost in translation
“We know that we are good at speaking to the consumer,” explains Shannon Osman, Retail Director at Footasylum. “We wanted to make sure that we had that same […] thing happening with our staff and everyone that works for us in our business.”
We spoke with Shannon and she shared how Zipline helped take the brand from chasing information across WhatsApp, Teams, Sharepoint, Spreadsheets and Email to centralizing communications and operations for their 1,300 members of staff.
“Head office would trust that a message was going to get filtered down to area managers. Area managers would cascade it to store managers. Store managers would hopefully cascade it to everyone else,” explains Shannon.
But even in the best circumstances, this was an imperfect way of sharing priorities, Shannon notes. “A message starts as X, and by the time it gets to the end, it’s Y.”
The Footasylum team were managing many of these comms across channels like Email and WhatsApp. This meant priorities and information were reaching the team unevenly, preventing them from having a shared understanding of what was important at any given time.
When communications are fragmented in this way, creating a consistent brand experience becomes harder to deliver and even harder to track — especially across 66 locations.
Leaders on the floor, not in the back office
Footasylum knew they needed to empower and standardize store leadership practices in a few ways. Firstly, Shannon wanted to make sure that managers had time to coach and train without leaving the store floor to seek clarity on policy.
Before Zipline, they tried another system. “That only had store access, so we found the managers were actually having to come off the shop floor and go into the back of house, which was completely against what we were trying to get it to do.”
Shannon saw improving consistency across area managers as an area of opportunity that would also improve the flow of information and execution.
With the brand’s priorities in mind, Shannon approached the team at Zipline to discover how the platform could bring the same clarity and consistency to their internal operations that the brand already delivered to its customers.
Finding the right fit
When it came to the Zipline evaluation and implementation process, Shannon was hands on and came with plenty of questions in the hopes that whichever platform she chose would be easy for end users to adopt.
“My team had a list of questions [and our rep] answered every question,” Shannon explains. “And it was pretty tough stuff that I was asking.” Shannon and her team’s questions centered around making sure they weren’t just replacing an old communications platform for another one. They needed reassurance on reliability, customer support, scalability, and implementation. And, with team members stationed across different roles, Footasylum needed to make sure the platform was right for everyone.
That’s why one consideration during the evaluation process was whether Footasylum’s social media-native Gen Z workforce would find the Zipline interface familiar and comfortable enough to actually use.
Footasylum’s team of young retail professionals grew up using social media every day, which meant that it was important that the Zipline platform was mobile-first. For floor staff, Zipline needed to feel like something teams could easily see themselves navigating and using on shift.
For leadership “the biggest selling point was creating one source of truth across retail,” Shannon says. “We wanted to reduce the number of emails, messages and additional platforms while improving communication between head office and stores. The leadership team particularly valued the visibility into store execution and the consistency it would bring across the business.”
Once Shannon and the rest of her leadership’s criteria were settled, she allowed store teams to explore Zipline’s interface before committing. Soon after, the Footasylum team was rolling out to one location and then the rest.
“Having our team all go and play with it and make sure it was right for us was absolutely key,” Shannon emphasizes.
Within two weeks, Zipline was in every Footasylum store in the country, and the best part? IT team implementation was a breeze. At this point, the Footasylum team was more than ready to experience how Zipline could help them improve communications, engagement, and their in-store experience.
From rollout to results
With Zipline live across every location, the next step was using it to change how information actually flowed. Speed of roll out helped the busy team get control faster.
Every member of staff got a Zipline account including teams in payroll, VM, marketing, buying, and ops. Soon, Shannon and the team started targeting overwhelm by getting strategic about communications.
“Departments constantly have got a reputation for inundating stores and thinking that their department is the priority, and it’s got to land constantly. Whereas now my ops team can almost filter,” she says.
More efficient communication processes in the Zipline platform also meant that field leaders had clarity around expectations and execution.
“I’ve got a group of area managers that are all completely different, they all do things in several different ways, but now I can make sure the things I actually want them to do are consistent and delivering messages to stores in the same way.”
Zipline gave Shannon the visibility right away to connect routine communications coming from herself and HQ to metrics like readership and execution. With full visibility all the way through to execution, Shannon no longer had to wonder whether messages were being delivered and influencing action. She could finally see for herself.
With clarity on timing and expectations reset right away, the Footasylum team wasted no time training Zipline’s interactive chatbot, Zippy AI, to support managers and members of staff on the floor. Zippy supports frontline teams as a conversational AI companion that companies can train on their own policies, promotions, and products. Employees can ask Zippy questions on their devices from the shop floor and get accurate and up-to-date answers.
Previously, managers were coming off the shop floor to get more information on policies and products. With Zippy, associates could then stay on the floor and research anything they were unsure of without leaving the customer or asking management.
It’s a practical change but one that makes all the difference for both the customer and the associate experience by keeping associates exactly where they should be.
More than an ops win
In addition to their improvements in store execution, Footasylum have had major cultural and industry wins alongside their operational transformation.
Footasylum’s team is engaged. They track their own health metrics and readership scores and even get curious about how their performance stacks up against other Zipline customers.
Staff turnover has plummeted for the retailer, dropping nearly in half from 130% to 75% and Footasylum is serious about making sure every voice matters.
This past year, Footasylum received 1,000+ frontline votes cast for their Store Manager of the Year accolades — a change from how the award was chosen previously, with just a few senior leaders consulted. But after running the award through Zipline, getting news and culture updates out to the team of 1,300+ was simpler and more impactful than it has ever been and encouraged participation from all members of staff.
They’re on an incredible run and it’s no coincidence that a brand that understands their customers so well would also set out to deliver a more connected experience for its staff by turning to Zipline.
The sky is the limit when it comes to what’s next for Footasylum and Zipline. Beyond communication and task management, Footasylum is using Zipline for operational resources, training content, audits, and compliance. Their longer term vision is to make sure that all their store assessments are completed within Zipline, enabling the data to support Zippy’s searches for ongoing staff training and development.
When asked to sum up their Zipline experience in one word, Shannon doesn’t hesitate: “Effortless.” For a brand that went from managing six platforms to one and achieved so much in the last year, it’s clear that Footasylum is just getting started.
Ready to see how Zipline can help your teams communicate, execute, and stay on the same page? Book a demo today.
