The Move That Made Hobbiesville’s App Outsell Its Store

Hobbiesville, a Canadian collectible retailer, has built one of the fastest-growing communities in trading cards, toys, and Japanese imports.

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Founded in 2020, the brand was born when co-founder Logan Fournier found a binder of Pokémon cards in his parents’ basement and teamed up with Edmond Georges to scale it into a retail business. Within weeks, the duo had incorporated Hobbiesville at a coffee shop and started disrupting an industry dominated by old-school hobby shops.

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One of their earliest (and boldest) moves? Launching with a mobile app just three months in.

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From the start, Hobbiesville knew mobile would be critical to building its community. They launched their first app with another provider, but as the business scaled, the cracks began to show. 

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Their first app couldn’t support the integrations they needed, led to hours of support issues each week, and created inconsistent experiences between app and web. 

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“At one point we were spending three to four hours a day dealing with app issues like broken checkout or failed add-to-cart,” recalls Edmond. “That’s time we weren’t spending on our customers or growing the business.”

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The mission: Building a modern experience in a dated industry

Hobbiesville knew from day one that their community wanted daily drops, push notifications, and an experience that felt native to mobile.

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But previous app builders came with painful tradeoffs:

• Limited integrations (no Google Analytics, Firebase, or loyalty features)
• Bugs and support tickets that ate up 3–4 hours a day
• A clunky UX that siloed app and website experiences
• Expensive, time-consuming custom build options that turned them into a “tech company” overnight

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 “If you go custom, you’re not just launching an app—you’re running a tech company. You need developers, a roadmap, and forever maintenance,” said Edmond.

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Reactiv offered the balance Hobbiesville needed: enterprise-level integrations without the burden of managing tech debt, plus the flexibility to customize the customer-facing side.

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As Edmond explains: “There’s a reason we built our store on Shopify instead of building our own ecommerce platform. For the same reason, we turned to Reactiv. We don’t want to maintain integrations or APIs. We just want to deliver the best customer experience.”

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Why Hobbiesville chose Reactiv

Reactiv checked every box that mattered to the team:

• Deep integrations into loyalty, analytics, and subscriptions without extra dev work
• A native React app (not iframes) for a truly branded, cohesive experience
• Sync between web and app to avoid silos and support headaches. Customers shouldn’t have to wonder why a promo works on web but not in app. It all just needs to be the same.
• Push notifications that drive traffic to product drops, live streams, blogs, and even gamified experiences

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“Sometimes you don’t want to bring people just to a product—you want to bring them to a collection, a blog, a livestream, even a gamified experience. Reactiv lets us do that,” said Edmond. “The biggest shift is I don’t lose hours of my day dealing with app problems. That translates directly into revenue.”

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Most importantly, Reactiv allowed the team to scale without having to become a software company. The Hobbiesville team could focus on sales and marketing, versus living in the app code to make simple changes.

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“A lot of app builders focus on vitamins—features that sound nice but don’t actually solve a merchant’s biggest problems. Reactiv focuses on painkillers. They’ve done the time with merchants, they know what’s broken, and they’ve built solutions that actually matter.”
—Edmond, Co-founder of Hobbiesville

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The approach: Turning collectors into loyal app users

Hobbiesville’s community thrives on hype-driven releases. With Reactiv, the team can:

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• Announce new drops instantly through push notifications
• Reduce bot-driven buying thanks to built-in protections
• Deliver a smoother checkout with Shop Pay and auto-saved info
• Keep catalog updates consistent across 130,000 SKUs without manual duplication

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To drive adoption, Hobbiesville promotes the app at key touchpoints—through banners, website prompts, and incentives. Once shoppers download the app, the retention rate is exceptionally high.

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And beyond those core improvements, Hobbiesville is already taking advantage of Reactiv’s deeper features to delight its community:

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• A buylist available directly in the app, where collectors can sell back their trading cards
• Klaviyo, Klaviyo Back in Stock, and Zendesk integrations to keep communication and support tight
• Pre-order functionality and back-in-stock notifications so fans never miss out on limited drops
• An app-exclusive collection to reward loyal users with early access and special items

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“We have a very low bounce rate on app downloads. Once collectors try the app, they keep it. The experience is faster, more native, and feels built for them,” Edmond shared.

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The results: A higher-performing channel than web

The payoff has been massive:

• In its first week, the Reactiv-powered app drove one-third of all orders
• Hours of customer support issues have been eliminated, freeing the team to focus on growth instead of troubleshooting
• Customers now enjoy a unified, branded experience

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As Edmond puts it: “Not having to worry about things breaking is what excites me most. Every hour we save internally means a better experience for customers—and that translates directly to revenue.”

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The bottom line 

For a hype-driven industry where speed and trust matter most, Reactiv has given Hobbiesville exactly what they needed: a reliable, scalable, and customer-first mobile app.

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Ready to turn mobile into your highest-performing channel? Book a demo with us here.

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