Twenty product templates,
and a cart that skipped the samples.
RMS Beauty is one of the original organic color cosmetics lines, founded by makeup artist Rose-Marie Swift. Strong product-market fit, loyal editors, and a Shopify store carrying years of technical debt that was quietly capping DTC growth.
The situation,as it arrived.
Roughly twenty separate product template files existed as a legacy workaround, alongside leftover code from discontinued app trials. Routine updates were slow and the theme behaved unpredictably. Search failed on common misspellings. Bundled sets had unlinked variants, complicating fulfillment.
The most expensive defect was in the cart. The add-to-cart popup sent customers straight to checkout, bypassing the sample selector — which meant support tickets from customers who had missed the free sample the brand had promised them.
Four moves,in the order they happened.
Rebuild the purchase journey, not the brand
Clean-sheet UX with lots of white space, mobile-first from the first wireframe, consistent with the clean beauty positioning. The cart was rebuilt so the sample selector survives the flow instead of being skipped.
Remove the technical debt
Twenty product templates consolidated into a small set of purposeful page types, including a promotional variant for limited launches. Legacy app code removed. Shipping rules moved off a third-party app into native Shopify Scripts. Bundle variants linked.
Then market it, full funnel
Google Search, Display and Shopping alongside Facebook and Instagram, targeting demonstrated interest in clean and premium cosmetics rather than a broad beauty audience.
Build the organic base underneath
Continuous on-page work across product and collection pages, with content strategy rethought across Pinterest, YouTube and on-site tutorials so discovery was not entirely rented.
Everything thatleft the building.
- Shopify redesign, mobile-first
- Cart and sample-selector flow rebuilt
- Template consolidation and theme cleanup
- Shipping rules migrated to Shopify Scripts
- Sticky add-to-cart and inline upsell prompts
- Google Search, Display and Shopping
- Facebook and Instagram advertising
- SEO and content strategy
More like this one.One a month.
Written out of engagements rather than off a content calendar, by whichever principal ran the work. No sequence afterwards.
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