Commence Studio

05/25/2026

Brand equity is at risk with silo'd teams building in AI without the right brand systems implemented. We've spent the last few months building a new product category for our clients due to the demand of ever changing technology. It started as an internal experiment for our own rebuild. It became a system we couldn't stop thinking of applying to every brand engagement that came through the door.

Full reveal next Tuesday.

05/19/2026

"Won't a migration break everything?"

It's the first question every operator asks us when we talk about moving off WooCommerce. It's a fair question. There are enough horror stories out there to make anyone cautious.
So let's talk about what actually happened with DermaplanePro.

They migrated in December 2025. Peak commerce season. The month where every retailer is holding their breath. They had a $2M+ DTC business plus a wholesale channel selling to licensed estheticians, dermaplaning practitioners, and medical aesthetic clinics. They had Salesforce as their ERP, QPilot subscriptions they needed to move to Smartrr Subscriptions, Triple Whale analytics to integrate, and a custom B2B portal with gated content and licensing verification to rebuild.

A lot of moving parts. A lot of places where things could have gone wrong.

What actually happened: zero downtime, zero revenue disruption, and a 42% sales lift in the months that followed. Their conversion rate jumped from where it was to 7.71%. Organic search traffic grew 40%.

Their VP of Ops told us afterward, "We did the launch without any hiccups or impact on our sales and revenue, which was a major win."

The migrations that break aren't the ones that are technically complex. They're the ones that skip the architecture phase. We spent months mapping every integration, every piece of data, every URL redirect, every B2B workflow before we wrote a single line of theme code.
Migrations break when teams rush. They don't break because Shopify is fragile.

05/07/2026

The new https://na2.hubs.ly/H05gQ9w0 is live.

A clearer story. A sharper identity. 69 case studies. 47 essays. One coherent point of view about brand and commerce, finally in one place.

Built in 7 days, because we wanted to see if we could.

The work is the part we want you to look at. Start with the case studies and discover our Insights.
→ https://na2.hubs.ly/H05gQ9w0

05/04/2026

We are absolutely feeling the force.

Seven days ago, the team accepted a mission that, for the record, had a non-zero chance of ending in a Sith-level meltdown.

A week later, here's the receipt:
69 case studies. 47 blog posts. One new website. One week.

Made the Kessel run in slightly more than 12 parsecs. Documentation pending.
A new hope drops later this week. Stay tuned. These are the case studies you're looking for.

05/04/2026

"We already have a brand. We just need a new website."

That's exactly what Sorella Apothecary told us on our first call.

It's the most common thing we hear from growth-stage brands. And it's almost never the full picture.

When we dug into Sorella's situation, their brand was a logo and a color palette that looked different on every channel. The website said one thing. The packaging said another. Their wholesale materials for estheticians and spas told a completely different story. There was no system connecting any of it.

So we did something most agencies wouldn't suggest (because it's more work and a bigger conversation): we rebuilt the content architecture first. Defined the art direction and UX. Created a visual system that worked across web, social, events and wholesale. Then we brought in our photography and video team to create content that matched. Then we built the commerce experience on Shopify Plus to deliver on all of it.

If we had just "built a new website" without addressing the content architecture, we would have built a pretty site on a shaky foundation. And in 12 months, they'd be back for another redesign.

Instead: AOV up 17%. Add-to-carts up 155%. First-time purchasers up 92%. Email revenue up 150%. And a brand that finally feels like one brand everywhere.

The brands that invest in the foundation don't need to keep rebuilding. They compound.

05/01/2026

I'll keep saying this until it stops being true:

You cannot scale a business on a stack of disconnected tools held together by Zapier and good intentions.

I watched Sorella Apothecary's team manually bridge gaps between their old WooCommerce site, their warehouse system, their wholesale operations, and their marketing tools for months before we rebuilt everything. Smart, hardworking people spending their days on workarounds instead of growth.

When we migrated them to Shopify Plus and connected their systems properly (SKUVault for warehouse ops, Salesforce for sales enablement, Klaviyo for lifecycle marketing, Triple Whale for unified analytics, POS for their new retail channel) something shifted.

Their organic shopping traffic increased 3,439%. Not a typo. First-time purchasers up 92%. New users up 55%. They launched a retail POS channel that now accounts for 11% of gross sales. Those numbers didn't come from a marketing campaign. They came from having a system that actually works together, so the team could focus on growing instead of fixing.

The brands that figure out unified commerce don't just run more efficiently. They move faster. They make better decisions. They compound.

Is your system designed for where you're going, or just where you've been?

04/29/2026

The numbers that made the DermaplanePro migration worth it.

When we talk about moving from WooCommerce to Shopify, founders always lead with the same fears: "What if we lose SEO rankings?" "What about checkout conversion?" "What happens to our integrations?"

So let me just share what actually happened:
42% increase in sales post-launch.
Conversion rate jumped 30%, landing at 7.71%.
Organic search traffic up 40%.
Launched December 2025: zero downtime, zero revenue disruption.

VP of Operations, Morgan Picoy, told us afterward: "A lot of customers have been able to navigate the website easily without help from us." That one hits different when you've been running a site where your support team fields questions that should be answered by the UX.

But the part that doesn't show up in a metrics dashboard is the velocity change. Their team went from constantly patching WooCommerce plugins to actually building things. New B2B features, better subscription flows through Smartrr, deeper Salesforce integration. The platform stopped being a constraint and started being an accelerator.

We met with their team every single week during the project. Not a status call — a working session. Morgan mentioned that was a difference-maker: "Commence Studio met every week to ensure we were always on the same page."

That's the kind of partnership that produces results like these.

If your platform is holding you back, let's talk about your Blueprint.

04/27/2026

CRO is not a Shopify app.

I see this pattern constantly: a brand installs three or four conversion optimization apps, runs some A/B tests on button colors, and calls it a "CRO strategy."

Then they wonder why their conversion rate hasn't moved.

When we rebuilt Sorella Apothecary's commerce experience, we didn't start with apps. We started with research; heatmaps, customer surveys, behavioral analytics. We studied how people actually shopped on their site before we changed a single thing.

Then we rebuilt the architecture around what we learned. Navigation built around how customers actually browse, not how the brand organized their inventory internally. Clear page hierarchy where every page has a job and a next step. Load performance so people don't bounce before they see the product. Trust signals at every friction point.

The result was a 4.86% conversion rate and a 155% increase in add-to-carts. Not from apps. From strategy & architecture.

The brands with the best conversion rates don't have the best tech stack. They have the best understanding of how their customers actually behave, and they've built a system around that.

If you're spending money on traffic but haven't invested in understanding what happens after the click, you're filling a leaky bucket. That's literally what our Blueprint diagnostic is designed to uncover.

04/24/2026

Five B2B commerce shifts I'm watching closely in 2026:

Self-service is replacing the sales call. B2B buyers want to browse, price, and reorder without picking up the phone. We built DermaplanePro's professional portal with gated content, trade pricing, and licensing verification specifically so their wholesale customers could self-serve. The operational savings are real.

B2B and DTC are converging onto one platform. Both DermaplanePro and Sorella Apothecary run their professional/wholesale and consumer channels on a single Shopify Plus instance. One inventory. One set of analytics. One team managing it. The days of running separate systems for each channel are ending fast.

Brand matters in B2B now. The "B2B sites don't need to look good" era is dead. Your wholesale portal is a brand touchpoint. If it looks like it was built in 2014, that's the message you're sending to your most important accounts.

Shopify's B2B capabilities have matured. Two years ago I would have hesitated to recommend Shopify for complex B2B. Not anymore. The brands we're building for are consolidating DTC and wholesale onto one platform for the first time, and it's working.

The migration window matters. Brands that move now get 12-18 months of compounding advantages — in data, in velocity, in customer experience. Brands that wait will be playing catch-up.

Which of these is hitting closest to home?

04/21/2026

When Sorella Apothecary came to us, they said: "We just need a new website."
It's the most common thing we hear. And it's almost never the whole story.

Sorella is a professional skincare brand. They sell direct to consumers and wholesale to estheticians, spas, and clinics. When we looked under the hood, their brand showed up differently on every channel. The website told one story. The packaging told another. Their wholesale materials were a third thing entirely.

The website wasn't the problem. It was a symptom.

We started with the web blueprint architecture. Who is Sorella? How should they show up? What should a customer feel at every touchpoint? Then we built the commerce system to deliver on that promise — Shopify Plus with a partner loyalty program for their B2B estheticians, a retail store locator, Salesforce integration for sales enablement, SkuVault for warehouse ops, Klaviyo for lifecycle marketing, and Triple Whale for unified analytics.

We also brought in our photography and video team, STELO Creative, to create content that actually matched the new brand system. Because a brand refresh without new creative assets is like painting over wallpaper.

The numbers since launch: AOV up 17%. Conversion rate at 4.86%. Organic shopping traffic up 3,439%. New users up 55%. And they opened a retail channel through POS that now drives 11% of gross sales.

When you get the foundation right, everything compounds.

Discover how we replatformed Sorella Apothecary from WooCommerce to Shopify Plus, boosting beauty brand performance, B2B sales, and user engagement.

04/19/2026

I see this disconnect all the time: A brand invests six figures in a rebrand. Beautiful new identity. Gorgeous brand guidelines. Then they drop it onto the same broken, duct-taped WooCommerce stack and wonder why the experience still feels off.

Or the opposite. They invest heavily in a Shopify Plus build with all the right integrations, but the brand experience feels generic because nobody thought about how the brand should actually show up across every customer touchpoint.

Brand without infrastructure is just a pretty PDF sitting in a Google Drive. Infrastructure without brand is just a fast website that could belong to anyone.

This is exactly why we approached Sorella Apothecary the way we did. They came to us saying they needed a new website. But when we dug in, the real issue was that their brand showed up differently everywhere. The website, packaging, wholesale materials, social. None of it felt like the same company.

So we guided both at the same time through art direction, content audit and visual production. Brand and ecommerce systems, designed together as one. One strategy.

The result: add-to-carts up 155%, first-time purchasers up 92%, and a brand that finally feels cohesive everywhere customers encounter it.

That's what happens when brand and system are aligned. See the case study here: https://na2.hubs.ly/H04RZjN0

Discover how we replatformed Sorella Apothecary from WooCommerce to Shopify Plus, boosting beauty brand performance, B2B sales, and user engagement.