Db Journey, the Norwegian travel and outdoor brand formerly known as Douchebags, builds gear for people who carry expensive, delicate equipment to hard-to-reach places: skiers, surfers, photographers, DJs, and business travelers. From its Oslo headquarters, the 70-person team designs luggage, ski and surf carriers, and everyday backpacks, then ships them to 33 countries through distribution centers in the US, Belgium, and Norway.
In early 2022, Db Journey moved off a custom-built platform onto Shopify. The brand moved because the next stage of global growth should not require rebuilding every operational layer by hand. Since then, Db Journey has expanded into new markets, moved into premium luggage, brought AI into its daily operations, and begun opening its first stores. Since replatforming, Db Journey has:
- Run multi-warehouse routing across three distribution centers natively, with no custom development
- Launched a premium aluminum luggage line at a new $1,000-plus price point and sold through it faster than it can manufacture
- Held zero downtime through Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and influencer-driven traffic spikes with a small team
The challenge: scaling globally without rising development costs
Before Shopify, Db Journey ran on a custom-built platform. That setup worked while the brand was concentrated in its home markets, where it had come to dominate the backpack market in Norway. “I might be getting the stat wrong, but I think we’ve probably sold seven million backpacks to five million people,” said Theodor Marinius Tollefsen, chief digital officer at Db Journey. But the next phase of growth meant something harder: replicating that success across many new countries at once.
Global expansion carries operational weight. Every new market and every new warehouse adds complexity, and on a custom platform that complexity has to be built and maintained by hand.
“As you’re growing quite quickly globally, those costs can skyrocket,” Theodor said.
For Db Journey, the question was not whether the old platform could be made to work, but whether it could keep working without every new country, warehouse, or business model turning into another custom development project.
There was also a hard-won skepticism to overcome. After two decades in ecommerce and retail, Theodor had learned to distrust easy promises. “The whole thing of saying, ‘Hey, it’s an easy plug and play,’ that’s never ever been true,” he said. The team wanted a platform whose roadmap would track their own ambitions over time, rather than one they would constantly have to work around.
The solution: Shopify with built-in operational flexibility
Db Journey chose Shopify on a simple thesis: a platform able to solve most problems easily, at low maintenance cost, would keep pace with the brand as it scaled. That bet paid off first in fulfillment. Db Journey operates one distribution center in the US, one in Belgium, and one in Norway. Deciding which goods ship from which location sounds simple, Theodor said, but becomes “fairly complex” as markets, products, and inventory shift.
A lot of stuff is actually made out of the box. And believe it or not, it usually works very well.
The same pattern repeated as the brand reached for new business models. When Db Journey wanted to resell and refurbish used backpacks through a Lost & Found program, much of the groundwork already existed through Shopify and its partner Trove. A dedicated pro program for sponsored athletes and traveling professionals came together the same way. For a growing brand, that meant launching and testing new ideas without adding operational overhead.
Global expansion asked more of the platform than fulfillment alone. Every market behaves differently: the UK leads with luggage, the US runs on snow travel, and a shopper researching a trip in New York wants different content than one in Stockholm, down to whether they fly Ryanair or Delta. Shopify lets the team adapt merchandising, homepages, and content market by market without rebuilding the store each time. That flexibility also demanded discipline. “Even though we have quite unlimited possibilities, especially with Shopify, we actually do have to focus,” Theodor said, describing the choice to dig deep into one market like the US rather than chase every country that starts to take off.
Db Journey now sees AI reshaping the business in three places: how customers discover products, how shoppers choose what to buy, and how the team runs operations. Internally, the team uses Sidekick for reporting, forecasting, and inventory decisions: when to reorder, where stock is running short, and how to shift it between warehouses. It also surfaces problems and openings the team would otherwise miss, catching a single backpack underperforming in Spain or flagging a payment method the brand lacks in a market like Italy. They started small, using Sidekick to debug and diagnose, then to suggest fixes, and its role kept growing from there. “We’d never catch that without Sidekick,” Theodor said. The team has also connected Claude to Shopify for deeper analysis.
The result: high double-digit growth and zero-downtime peaks
The new foundation held as the brand moved upmarket. Db Journey posted high double-digit growth across 2023 and 2024. A minority investment from the LVMH Luxury Ventures Fund gave the team the confidence to build a full travel offering and invest further in premium luggage.
That move came from the community Db Journey had built over 15 years. The brand grew up close to alpine skiers like Aksel Lund Svindal, then to DJs and photographers who travel with expensive, fragile gear, the kind of people who check a couple hundred thousand dollars of camera equipment at the airport and need it to survive the trip. Those relationships pulled the brand into fashion, partly by way of Formula 1 teams that use Db cases to carry their steering wheels, and the LVMH partnership ultimately connected the team to footballer Erling Haaland. In May 2025, Db Journey launched its most premium aluminum luggage with Haaland at a new $1,000-plus price point. The line performed so well the brand is “struggling to make enough of it and get it delivered fast enough.”
Reliability proved out under the brand’s most stressful moments. When Haaland posts to his millions of Instagram followers, traffic to the site spikes hard, and the platform absorbed it without crashing. The same held through the year’s biggest peak, the period ecommerce teams often dread most. “November is always the worst month,” Theodor said. “It’s full of anxiety, sleepless nights. Will it hold? Will it break?” Getting through Black Friday and Cyber Monday takes careful choreography for a small team: coordinating with Shopify and development partners on the exact timing of every drop, and working with the warehouses to move promotional stock to where it could be picked fastest before the rush. It paid off. Db Journey came through the peak without the problems Theodor had braced for.
We had a very good Black Friday and Cyber Monday execution, and the platform was just, everything worked.
The loyalty that growth depends on, Db Journey earns through the product itself rather than through rewards programs. “I don’t think there’s any luggage brand in the world that has as loyal customers as we do,” Theodor said. Gear that survives years of travel brings people back, backed by service as direct as a luggage hotline for anyone unsure what to buy.
The next chapter: retail, new categories, and AI-led discovery
Db Journey is taking that operating model into retail. The brand is opening its first retail store in Stockholm, with New York also planned, after years of pop-ups, ecommerce, and wholesale. For a brand moving from online growth into physical retail, Theodor pointed to Shopify’s inventory, stock, and point-of-sale capabilities as a natural extension of the same system. “It’s so well made for brands like us,” he said. The product line is also broadening across three areas: luggage and travel, sports travel, and everyday backpacks, with a more protective surfboard bag arriving over the summer.
The bigger shift is in how customers find the brand at all. Traffic from traditional search is falling as shoppers ask AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude what to buy, sometimes completing the purchase without ever visiting the site. Theodor reads that as an opportunity rather than a threat for a brand with real substance behind it. “Whether someone’s on our site or not, it doesn’t really matter,” he said. “If we’re helping them buy the right product, that’s a win.” Frida, the brand’s AI customer service agent built with Gorgias, already shows what that looks like on the storefront.
Frida sells luggage every week to customers who might otherwise have left undecided: “People buy luggage just from chatting with her.” Through all of it, the team keeps one metric central. For Theodor, conversion is more than a metric. “There’s no better branding than selling someone a product and having them love that product,” he said. With less friction across markets, channels, operations, and checkout, Db Journey keeps doing exactly that: helping more people find the right gear, buy with confidence, and come back when it lasts.