This week's highlights: a wholesale trade platform for a premium hair wellness brand

TLDR: This fortnight we went live with a full wholesale trade channel for a premium hair wellness brand, built a self-serve appointment and events booking engine for a professional beauty and aesthetics business, and rolled out new paid-campaign landing pages and a skin quiz for a results-led clinical skincare brand.

Some fortnights are about the shop window. This one was about the back office, the part most shoppers never see but that quietly decides whether a business can grow. Three of our builds this week were about letting other businesses buy, book and order, not just consumers.

There is something satisfying about that kind of work. It rarely makes for a flashy screenshot, yet it is the difference between a brand that sells one unit at a time and one that opens a whole new channel. We spent the fortnight on trade accounts, appointment days and paid-campaign landing pages, with a few smaller touches in between.

Here is the rundown.

This week's highlights: a wholesale trade platform for a premium hair wellness brand

A premium hair wellness brand now has a proper trade channel running on the same store its shoppers already use. Salons and stockists can apply for an account, get approved by the team, and then see their own trade pricing the moment they log in. It is not a discount code pretending to be wholesale. It is a real second channel, with its own rules.

The front door is a trade application that adapts to whoever is filling it in. A small salon sees different questions to a larger distributor, so nobody wades through fields that do not apply to them. Each application lands with the team to approve or decline, and we rebuilt the form so it feels like the brand rather than a generic sign-up. First impressions matter as much in wholesale as they do at the checkout.

Once an account is live, pricing does the heavy lifting. Each account sits on its own tier, and the team can decide which products a given buyer is allowed to see, so a regional stockist and a flagship partner can be shown different ranges. Trade pricing works across markets and currencies, and prices can be edited in bulk rather than one item at a time. That last point sounds dull until you are repricing a hundred products by hand.

Ordering then works the way trade buyers actually shop. A quick-order view shows the trade price next to the usual retail price, a minimum order value keeps orders sensible, and approved accounts can pay on terms instead of upfront. Repeat orders can be scheduled so a salon does not have to remember to reorder, invoices are raised automatically when an order is dispatched, and every invoice sits in the account ready to download. Approval emails and order updates send themselves, so the team is not copying confirmations all day.

To keep the channel fed, we built a dedicated landing page inviting hair salons to open a trade account, with a sign-up that flows straight into the same approval queue. If you have read these updates before, you will know we are fond of self-service wholesale ordering, and this is the most complete version of it we have built. A brand that used to sell one bottle at a time can now open its doors to the trade, on its own terms.

Under the hood

A professional beauty and aesthetics business now runs its in-person appointment days and training events straight from its own website, rather than leaning on a separate booking tool. The experience is deliberately familiar: you pick the service first, then a time, then say who is coming. Three steps, no friction, no account needed to get started.

The part we are proud of is the party builder. An "add more people" option knows exactly how many places are left in a given slot, and it quietly stops a booking before it can overfill. Capacity-aware booking is the kind of thing that is invisible when it works and very visible when it does not, so we spent the time getting the counting right.

Each event gets its own page, and a single booking quietly does several jobs at once. It creates a calendar invite the customer can add in a tap, adds them to the brand's email programme so reminders go out on their own, and writes the booking into the sales CRM the team already lives in. The team can set events up themselves from an admin area, and the ticket confirmation emails send automatically. One action, several systems, no double entry.

Worth noting, if you are weighing up a similar build: we matched the behaviour of the familiar external booking tool people already knew, while keeping all the data in one place. Customers got the experience they expected, and the brand got a single, tidy record of every booking, invite and reminder instead of three disconnected ones. Familiarity on the outside, one source of truth on the inside, is usually the right trade.

Other work this fortnight

A results-led clinical skincare brand got a set of new landing pages built for its paid campaigns, each one tuned to the audience clicking through from an ad. The clever touch is the offer: the launch discount applies on its own as soon as someone lands, so the saving is already in the basket rather than waiting behind a code nobody remembers to type. We paired the pages with a skin quiz that asks a few simple questions and points each shopper towards the products that genuinely suit them, which is a far kinder welcome than dropping a first-time visitor onto a wall of serums.

The quick wins

A smaller but lovely one: we made leaving a review almost effortless on our reviews tooling. Returning customers now have their details filled in for them, and a new submit-all step lets someone rate several products in one go rather than slogging through them one at a time. Fewer steps, more reviews, which is exactly the trade every shop wants.

That is the fortnight: a new wholesale channel, a booking engine that behaves itself, and a few things made quietly easier. Not a flashy one, but the kind of work that compounds. More next Tuesday.

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash.