Case Study: Rebuilding House of Colour’s Complex Custom Discount & Credit Setup on Shopify

TL;DR

• We migrated House of Colour from a bespoke platform to Shopify, launching stores for both the UK and US.
• Our multi-store codebase solution ensures efficient management of stores, whilst enabling localisation across regions.
• We leveraged Checkout Extensions, Shopify Functions and Shopify Flow to replicate a complex custom credit and discount setup in Shopify.
• Custom product page development has simplified navigation for users and tailored the customer experience.
• The result: US average order value more than doubled, and online revenue grew over five-fold across both markets in the year following launch.

House of Colour: Brand overview

House of Colour is a UK-based colour and style consultancy business that helps individuals discover true confidence through personalised analysis. Since 1985, the company has expanded via a skilled network of franchisees, with operations reaching the US, UAE and Europe.

Alongside its consultancy services, House of Colour runs an online retail store selling products designed to complement its styling philosophy. This includes cosmetics tailored to seasonal colour palettes and beauty tools that enable customers to apply their learning at home. 

The company’s retail model is built around a stylist-led referral network: customers can purchase products at a discount using a stylist’s unique code, and stylists earn credit whenever their code is used, which they can put toward their own purchases.

The challenge: Legacy technology limiting growth

House of Colour’s custom ecommerce platform had become a significant constraint on the business, limiting both day-to-day operations and longer-term growth.

Architecture & maintenance

The platform was heavily reliant on bespoke code, making even minor updates dependent on developer involvement. This resulted in slow, costly changes and created a fragile codebase that was difficult to maintain. As a result, the team faced ongoing challenges in keeping the site up-to-date and evolving it in line with business needs.

CMS & content

The existing CMS was restrictive and inflexible, requiring technical knowledge to manage even basic content updates. This made it difficult for marketing and trading teams to independently create and optimise landing pages, campaigns and SEO content, ultimately slowing down time-to-market and limiting experimentation.

UX & design

From a customer perspective, the site no longer met modern expectations. The look and feel were dated, and the user experience was inconsistent across devices and browsers. Any meaningful design improvements required redevelopment, making it difficult to continuously evolve the frontend.

Performance & scalability

Running on legacy self-managed infrastructure, the platform struggled to scale effectively during traffic spikes. Performance improvements required significant engineering effort, and the lack of built-in global content delivery limited the experience for international customers.

Commerce functionality

Key ecommerce capabilities were either missing or overly complex. There was no native support for multi-currency or internationalisation, and regional pricing and tax handling were limited. The checkout relied on custom logic that was difficult to optimise, whilst B2B functionality was also lacking.

AI & automation

The platform lacked modern AI-driven features such as intelligent search, product recommendations and personalisation. This meant merchandising and operational processes were largely manual, reducing efficiency and limiting opportunities to enhance the customer experience.

How Swanky helped

Migration to Shopify

We supported House of Colour’s transition from a custom platform to Shopify through our proven replatforming process, designed to minimise risk and ensure continuity. This included a detailed discovery phase to map existing functionality, workflows and data structures, followed by careful planning of the migration to preserve critical website functionality.

Migrating to Shopify provides House of Colour with a far more flexible and user-friendly platform, enabling the team to manage and update the online store quickly without relying on complex custom development. This makes it easier to refresh content, launch new products and respond to seasonal campaigns or promotions in real time.

This transition also reduces the operational burden of maintaining a bespoke system, with Shopify handling hosting, security and platform updates. As a result, the team can focus more on growing the business and supporting its stylist network, whilst benefiting from a stable, scalable infrastructure that can evolve alongside the brand.

Multi-store codebase implementation

We took a multi-store (or expansion store) approach to House of Colour’s international selling requirements, creating two separate Shopify stores for the UK and US that function independently of one another. This approach allows the brand to operate flexibly across the two different markets, as well as rank effectively for local keywords.

We deployed our multi-store codebase solution to reduce the complexity that can come with managing multiple stores. As part of this, the ‘master store’ – the UK store in this case – holds the core codebase, and any fundamental changes can be deployed once and then extrapolated to the US store via server-side scripts. 

Crucially, each store can retain unique elements within the shared codebase, allowing House of Colour to retain local specificity across regions.

This solution will also aid the rollout of any further international expansion stores in the future, enabling House of Colour to scale rapidly across regions with reduced cost and complexity.

Bespoke discounting & credit solution

House of Colour was using a complex custom discounting and credit setup on its previous ecommerce solution, with intricate custom logic and bespoke discount codes. A particular challenge of this project was implementing this in Shopify and ensuring an intuitive solution for the House of Colour team. 

We leveraged Checkout Extensions, Shopify Functions and Shopify Flow to achieve our desired outcome, which we reference below when exploring the core site flows.

Client checkout flow

Following a colour consultation, a “stylist” provides a “client” with a unique “client code” which they can use to get a percentage discount on House of Colour purchases. 

Once a client has added a product or products to their cart, they navigate to the checkout and enter the client code in a custom field enabled by a checkout extension (seen in the screenshot below).

If a product is eligible for a discount (checked via the has_discount metafield), and the client code entered at the checkout is correctly validated in an external database, a percentage will be taken off the line item cost (this discount value is pulled from the market-level metafield). 

A flow takes the client code and transfers it to the customer’s metafield, so that the checkout automatically populates with the relevant client code for a returning user. This creates a seamless customer experience whilst reducing the chance of errors.

A purchase triggers a commission for the corresponding stylist in the form of store credit, which they can use towards future orders of their own. The commission amount varies depending on the product/s purchased by the client, with the specific commission percentage stored in a metafield in the Shopify admin. 

We also customised the backend flow so that the stylist immediately receives an email when a client’s purchase earns them commission, informing them of the amount earned.

Order refund flow

A specific refund flow ensures that if a product is returned, the corresponding commission is reversed. The stylist’s commission information is updated to deduct any commission earned from refunded line items.

Stylist checkout flow

A stylist can log into their House of Colour account and view their current credit value (pulled from the stylist company metafield). 

When they get to the checkout, the maximum amount of credit possible is automatically deducted from the order – stylists do not have a choice on how much credit they spend at checkout.

A combined shipping and order discount function allows discounting of both the order and shipping costs.

Bespoke external database

Data on stylists, completed orders and refunds is sent to a custom-made instance with a 3rd party platform with the help of webhooks. It is collected and stored in a database, making it easy for the House of Colour team to report on transactions from a credit perspective.

Custom PDP development

Linked product variations

Many of House of Colour’s products are offered in a range of shades, to suit different colour seasons and skin tones. For example, the brand’s eyeshadow palette is available in 10 different variations.

Each of these variations is set up as a distinct product in Shopify Admin, with its own product detail page (PDP) on the House of Colour site. Each of the 10 PDPs displays the other variations available and links through to the relevant PDPs for the different variations. The redirection is so quick and subtle that it gives the effect of one product page with 10 variants. 

This is achieved using Shopify’s metafield functionality, simplifying navigation for users and streamlining the path to purchase.

PDP personalised recommendations

If a client is logged into the House of Colour site, they are presented with personalised product recommendations based on their individual colour season and skin tone. This data is pulled through from Max, a bespoke system built and managed by House of Colour, where all colour consultation results are uploaded.

Presenting tailored product suggestions is proven as an effective way to increase conversion rate, strengthen relationships with customers, and create a more meaningful, memorable experience for shoppers.

Results

At the core of House of Colour’s new Shopify digital architecture is a robust and scalable platform designed to deliver exceptional user experiences.

But the new store had to do more than look good. House of Colour needed a site that turned visitors into customers in both its established UK market and its newer US market. In the first seven months after launch, the store has done just that, with significant improvements in both AOV and conversion rate boosting revenue across both stores.

Site speed has also contributed to these results, with both stores passing all three of Google’s Core Web Vitals site-wide, something only around 60% of mobile ecommerce sites manage. Product pages load in 1.17s in the US and 1.40s in the UK, well within Google’s 2.5-second limit. 

Client feedback

Sharing his reflections on the project, Colin Graham, Global CTO at House of Colour, commented:

“Overall, the Swanky team has delivered a strong working solution that represents a meaningful improvement for our business both now and in the future. The platform provides a solid foundation for growth, and despite the complexity of a non-standard system requirement, the result is robust and fit for purpose.

“From a personnel perspective, the experience was consistently positive. Everyone we worked with was professional and a genuine pleasure to deal with.”

Migrate your international brand to Shopify with Swanky

As a leading Shopify Platinum partner, Swanky has extensive experience handling complex migrations from custom and legacy platforms to Shopify, as well as supporting bespoke development requirements. 

To find out how we could support your brand with a transformation project, contact our team today.