Building a brand and an online business from scratch when COVID closed the doors.

The first problem was obvious. The business had always been in person, and part of the appeal was the experience: event pricing, a room full of stock, and the sense of a deal happening now. That had to survive translation to a screen, for customers who had never bought from the company online.

The second was less visible and more dangerous. Much of the catalogue was nearly identical, dozens of shades of the same product differing by a word on the label, stored in a way that worked when customers browsed it themselves and not at all for order fulfillment. Picking that by eye guarantees errors, and in cosmetics a wrong shade is a returned order and a lost customer.

I created Discount Makeup as a consumer brand aimed squarely at customers who know their makeup and love a deal. The identity landed more feminine and more pink than my own taste would have chosen, which was the right answer for the customer. The Shopify store was designed to carry some of the urgency that made the live events work, and I marketed it across paid social, search, and Amazon.

The operational work was harder. I turned the warehouse into a dark store, laid out so visually similar shades were deliberately separated, and added barcode verification so every pick was confirmed by scan rather than by eye. Inventory, picking, and shipping ran as one connected system, synced to the store in real time.

The operation did what it was built to do. Orders were picked, packed, and shipped accurately from a catalogue that made accuracy difficult. But online demand never reached a level that made the business profitable.

When the owners of the original company decided to restructure the operation the store depended on, continuing would have meant rebuilding much of it for a business that wasn't yet paying its way. I made the call to walk away.

It was the most complete education I've had in running a business end to end, with every function, from brand and marketing to the warehouse floor and customer service, mine to get right. The original company is not named here at the owners' request.