| Company | Craft-led premium handwoven apparel, direct to consumer |
|---|---|
| Role | Merchandising and catalogue architecture. Platform migration, collection structure, conversion. |
| Market | India |
The situation
A craft-led premium brand with a genuinely large catalogue and no structure to it. Products had been added as they were made. Collections reflected internal categories. Variants had multiplied. The long tail had never been pruned because nothing forces you to prune it.
The symptom was that customers could not find the thing they came for. The diagnosis people usually reach for is search or filtering. The actual problem was further up: the catalogue was organised around the business, not around the decision.
The constraint
On a large-SKU considered purchase, merchandising architecture is a growth lever. It is almost always treated as an operations chore, and the cost of that shows up in the media budget rather than in the ops budget, which is why nobody connects the two.
That disconnect is the interesting part. Nobody looks at rising cost per acquisition and concludes the collections are wrong. The money is being spent in one department and lost in another, so the two never meet in a conversation.
What I did
Migrated to Shopify while streamlining rather than porting
A migration is the only moment when restructuring a catalogue is politically possible, because everything is being touched anyway. Porting 500 SKUs across as-is would have moved the problem to a better platform.
Rebuilt collections around how the buyer chooses
Not how the business files things. Different starting points, different collections.
Collapsed variants and dealt with the long tail
Merged where the distinction was invisible to a customer, retired where the item was not earning its place in the decision.
What moved, and what it means
Conversion held through the transition and ROAS improved on the other side.
Holding conversion through a replatform is the result. Migrations routinely cost 10 to 30% of conversion for months while URLs, indexing and habits settle. Coming through flat means the structural work paid for the disruption. Coming through flat and then seeing ROAS improve means the new structure was doing something the old one was not.
The absence of a dramatic percentage here is honest. This is a case where the win is that nothing broke and then things quietly got better, which is less impressive to read and more difficult to achieve.
What I would tell you before you hire me for this
This was agency-side work, and I owned the merchandising and catalogue architecture rather than the technical build.
I am strong on catalogue and collection structure on large SKU counts. I am less strong on pricing architecture at the individual SKU level and on the deeper operational side of Shopify. I can review both and ask useful questions. On the detail I would defer to your team rather than pretend otherwise.
Where this is relevant
Any brand with a few hundred SKUs or more where the catalogue grew organically, particularly craft, artisanal or made-to-order categories where every item feels distinct to the maker and looks similar to the buyer. Especially relevant if a replatform is already being considered, because that is the cheapest moment to fix it.