Shure charts a new digital future with Cleverbridge

How the 100-year-old audio brand is establishing its ecommerce operations and building a global software business.

The challenge

Shure has been a global leader in professional audio equipment for 100 years, renowned for its microphones, headphones, and wireless systems. The list of Shure use cases is nearly endless: television, music studios, live concerts, sporting events, press conferences, and, more recently, digital media (e.g., streaming and podcasts) and corporate environments.

As the audio industry evolved, with more of its customers' needs and workflows gravitating to digital, Shure recognized the urgency to diversify its offerings — integrating software solutions that complemented its hardware products. In doing so, the company could introduce new revenue streams while ensuring its ability to scale globally across markets. Shure was also interested in looking beyond product acquisition and how digital strategies could extend the customer lifecycle.

Transitioning to a software-centric model, however, presented challenges. A hardware company at its core, Shure did not have any in-house experience selling digital products, and would essentially need to learn an entirely new way of doing business to overcome the hurdles inherent in software-driven ecommerce.

Top of mind for Shure was managing global ecommerce operations (e.g., payments, tax, and compliance across markets), reducing subscription billing complexity, and ensuring best-in-class security. Shure needed a solution — rather, a partner — to facilitate this digital transformation, efficiently and effectively.

The solution

To support its transformation into a digitally driven, software-augmented enterprise, Shure sought a partner that could help operationalize and scale global ecommerce sales. Cleverbridge emerged as a natural fit.

“Cleverbridge is one of our critical partners for innovation and go-to-market,” said Neil Shah, Associate Vice President of Global Marketing at Shure. “Software is increasingly important to us, and Cleverbridge is core to bringing that value proposition to market.”

A key requirement was a platform that could integrate seamlessly with Shure’s existing systems and processes, while also supporting diverse software sales models — including paid subscriptions, free trials, and freemium offerings.

Beyond technical compatibility, Shure also prioritized forward-thinking strategic alignment with its ecommerce partner.

“We realized early on that Cleverbridge understood who Shure was as a company — not only where we are today, but where we want to get to in the future,” said Alex Dominque, Associate Director of Strategic Planning at Shure. “It was clear they would be the right partner to help us on that journey and the next evolution of our business.”

Cleverbridge’s Merchant of Record (MoR) solution offered out-of-the-box capabilities that Shure didn’t need to build internally, like global payment processing and payment orchestration. These features enabled Shure to focus on accelerating product innovation and reaching new customer segments without being bogged down by backend maintenance and operational work.

The results

Thanks to Cleverbridge’s turnkey integrations and deep domain expertise, Shure was able to quickly launch a scalable, compliant, and user-friendly global ecommerce operation for its software portfolio.

In addition, Cleverbridge assisted with necessary safeguarding for free trials, by having denied parties screening stood up quickly and seamlessly. Doing so let Shure remain compliant and weed out bad actors from accessing the software, a key security measure that also allowed the company to parse clean user data from its flow of trial signups.

Since launching with Cleverbridge, Shure has registered over 340,000 unique free trial users for its audio software across 231 global markets, a testament to the platform’s scale and reach.

“Cleverbridge is a partner that brings us the ecommerce capabilities that we don’t have to invent or build ourselves,” said Shah. “Through their acumen we’ve witnessed, across all of our customer segments, continuous growth and expansion of our software sales.”

While Shure is still early in this evolution, they see software as a key part of their future value proposition and product strategy. Cleverbridge has been aligned with that vision from the start, working in close collaboration to ensure the foundation, processes, and insights are in place to support long-term growth.

With new products and global markets on the horizon, this is just the beginning. Cleverbridge will continue to provide the strategic and operational support Shure needs to navigate its digital go-to-market journey and realize the full potential of its software business.