This week's highlights: a complete wholesale platform for a premium clothing brand

TLDR: We built a complete wholesale ordering platform for a premium clothing brand, moved a luxury beauty distributor's margin reporting onto actual costs, and launched an anniversary store-credit programme for a clinical skincare brand. There is a shoppable digital lookbook in here too.

July has started at a gallop. The past fortnight produced 236 commits across 25 projects, which is brisk even by our standards. Reading back through the list, one theme keeps surfacing: ownership. Client after client is moving a core part of their business off rented software and onto something they control.

That spans wholesale ordering, sales commissions, loyalty credit and a digital magazine. Some of it went live quietly, and some of it replaced tools that clients had been paying for since before we met them. Here is the rundown.

This week's highlights: a complete wholesale platform for a premium clothing brand

The standout build is for a premium clothing brand that sells to boutiques and department stores alongside its own site. Wholesale life was split across three places: a rented marketplace for orders, separate agency software for sales reps and commissions, and spreadsheets for the rest. Over the fortnight we brought all of it into a single Shopify B2B platform that lives inside their own store.

Trade buyers sign into a gated area on the brand's site, see their own pricing tier and catalogue, and order without ever touching the old marketplace. The team gets one home for companies, buyers and leads, with a search that finds any of them from a single box. Their dashboard opens on the tasks that need attention, plus a chase list for unpaid invoices. Migration is handled too: an import brings every company and contact across from the old system in one pass.

The stockist side lives here as well. Every stockist sits in a directory, plotted on a map, with a coverage report comparing where orders come from against where stockists actually are. It shows, at a glance, the towns full of customers with no local stockist. A new sales module handles wholesale orders, commission invoices and rep statements, which retires the separate agency software altogether.

Reordering decisions get their own tooling: ten sales velocity and demand forecasting reports, refreshed overnight, so the team can see what is selling and what needs restocking before it becomes urgent. Wholesale activity now flows into their email platform too, so trade buyers get journeys designed for trade buyers rather than borrowed retail ones.

And on the retail side, the same fortnight produced a shoppable digital lookbook. It reads like a magazine: full-bleed spreads with a page-turner feel, a shop control that reveals the products on each spread, and a cart that opens without leaving the page. The team reorders pages and chapters in a simple builder, and the final page invites readers to sign up for the print edition. There is even a trade brand-guidelines page, so every stockist presents the brand the same way.

Under the hood: margin reporting built on actual costs

The quieter piece of work I keep telling people about is for a luxury beauty and aesthetics distributor. Their finance reports can now show the actual cost of every item on every invoice line, rather than an estimate. If you have ever tried to report margin out of an inventory system, you will know why that deserves a paragraph of its own.

Most reporting uses an indicative cost, the standard figure held against each product. Real costs move with every purchase order, exchange rate and supplier change, so the estimate drifts. We rebuilt the data models to read the true cost from warehouse stock movements at the moment each item leaves, matched to the correct cost account in their finance system. Credit notes are handled properly as well, so returns cannot quietly flatter the numbers.

We also built a small companion app with one job: keeping the connection to their accounting platform authorised. Access there expires on a schedule, and when it lapses the overnight feeds stop without a sound. Now it renews itself, and the data keeps arriving.

Worth noting for anyone running margin reports on estimated unit costs: reconcile them against actual stock movements every quarter. The drift is nearly always bigger than expected, and it lands directly in your margin line.

Other work this fortnight

A clinical skincare brand launched an anniversary reward. A year on from their first purchase, customers receive £20 of store credit, with a claim page behind secure sign-in, claim emails, an admin dashboard, and a backfill so long-standing customers were included from day one. Orders over £150 with the campaign code now receive a full-size gift set automatically after checkout. A new guided skincare quiz went live as well, with a results page that mirrors the brand's site design and a marketing opt-in at the moment of highest interest.

A hair and scalp wellness brand's online consultation grew up considerably. Results now read like a specialist's report rather than a scorecard, and customers get a personal consult dashboard with photo capture and a cart that assembles their full regime. Questions advance instantly, with answers saved in the background, so the whole thing feels immediate. The storefront gained a tiered spend-and-save promotion at the same time, including a strip on product pages showing how close you are to the next reward.

We also delivered a brand-new portfolio site for an independent photographer, with a content system of their own behind it. It is a warm, serif-led design with galleries imported from their existing archive, image storage they own outright, and publishing that rebuilds the site the moment they press save.

The quick wins

Smaller wins made it out of the door as well. A beauty-tech device brand's collection pages gained a quiz-style shop-by-area strip, filtering products to the part of the face or body you care about. An outdoor oven maker received a new insights app that distils performance to a single page of numbers worth reading. A luxury fragrance house marked its 25th anniversary with a dedicated celebration page. And a family farm attraction's booking flow now offers add-ons matched to the ticket being bought, building on the experiences commerce platform we wrote about earlier this year.

That is the fortnight. The wholesale platform has a few more rooms to furnish, and there are two builds under way that we are itching to write about. Thanks for reading. More next Tuesday.

Photo by Vonecia Carswell on Unsplash