Replatforming a €20M+ retailer onto a modern CRM stack

01The situation

A European specialty retailer doing over €20M a year had outgrown its stack. The storefront and the email platform had both hit their limits, and the customer data underneath was in worse shape than either. Years of platform changes had left duplicate profiles with conflicting IDs, so the same customer might exist three times over. On top of that sat a catalogue in the thousands of SKUs, EU pricing regulations that most email platforms don't handle natively, and a buying cycle that looks nothing like typical e-commerce. One customer buys heavily for a single occasion and disappears for three months. Another buys every week as new stock lands. The old system couldn't segment for any of it.

02What I did

I migrated them to Shopify Plus and Klaviyo. Before a single email could go out, the entire subscriber database had to be deduplicated and the conflicting profile IDs reconciled into one clean record per customer. That took longer than the platform migration itself. With the data clean, I built the automation layer: welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase and win-back flows, all driven by conditional logic based on purchase history, category preference and price sensitivity, so a premium buyer gets a different experience from someone browsing entry-level products. For EU compliance I built custom product blocks that pull standard price, compare-at price and the Omnibus-compliant lowest prior price dynamically from the feed, so the marketing team never has to think about it. I split the product feed into several smaller feeds to stop the sync timeouts that were breaking email product blocks and risking channel suspensions. I connected the CRM to their mobile app for push notifications, built a custom preference centre with two-way sync between Klaviyo and Shopify metafields, and moved reporting onto a live analytics dashboard so the team stopped rebuilding numbers by hand every week.

03What changed

CRM's share of total revenue grew by more than 40%. The segmentation that made that possible simply wasn't available on the old platform. Reporting went from a weekly manual chore to a live dashboard. The business now has CRM infrastructure that can support personalisation at the level its catalogue demands.