A sales channel vanished overnight. We rebuilt it online.

The first problem was obvious. The entire business model was in-person, and the appeal was partly theatre — event pricing, a room full of stock, the sense of a deal happening now. That had to survive translation to a screen, for a customer base that had never bought from them online.

The second problem was less visible and more dangerous. The inventory was stored in a way that worked fine when customers browsed it themselves, and not at all for order fulfilment. Much of the catalogue was near-identical: dozens of shades of the same product, differing by a word on the label.

Picking that by eye guarantees errors, and in cosmetics a wrong shade is a returned order and a lost customer. Any storefront we built would only be as good as the warehouse behind it.

I developed a new consumer-facing brand — Discount Makeup — aimed squarely at a makeup-savvy, discount-driven audience. The identity landed more feminine and more pink than I first expected, and that was the correct answer for the customer rather than for my taste. The Shopify storefront was customised to match, designed to carry some of the urgency that made the live events work.

Then the harder half. I set up a dark store model inside the warehouse: racking installed, products sorted into labelled bins, one SKU per location, and visually similar shades deliberately separated so that a picker reaching for the wrong bin is an unlikely mistake rather than an easy one.

On top of that I implemented SkuVault, a cloud warehouse management system, so every pick is confirmed by barcode rather than by eye, with inventory tracked in real time and synced to Shopify. ShipStation completed the chain, integrated with both, generating labels automatically and folding shipping into the same warehouse workflow.

The combined Shopify, SkuVault and ShipStation stack kept the business selling through the period when its only channel had disappeared. Orders were picked, packed and shipped with the accuracy the catalogue demanded, and customer feedback was positive on both the shopping experience and what arrived in the box.

The pivot did more than hold sales momentum through the pandemic. It left the business with an operation that no longer depends on renting a room — a model that had been the whole company, and is now one channel among two.

The client is not named here at their request.