Multi-brand beauty groups face a specific version of a common problem. Each acquired or incubated brand tends to arrive with its own platform, its own vendor contracts, and its own maintenance overhead, and that overhead compounds as the portfolio grows. Consolidating onto a single platform reduces that overhead.
It also creates concerns around brand identity: brands that built their equity on being different from one another could end up looking the same. For a beauty group whose brands sell to different customers at different price points with different personalities, that would undo the thing the portfolio strategy depends on.
Orveon saw the opportunity to solve for both sides of that problem at once. Domaine had already been working with Laura Mercier (an Orveon brand) on its migration from Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify when bareMinerals approached us for the same transition, followed by BUXOM. Each engagement built on what came before it, and by the time we got to the third Orveon brand, the ambition had sharpened into something explicit: build one flexible platform foundation the whole portfolio could run on, and give each brand's team full control over how their storefront actually looked and behaved on top of it.
Priming the portfolio
All three brands started from the same place: Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC), with the complexity, slow load times, and licensing costs that come with running several separate SFCC instances across one company. Laura Mercier moved first, and its Shopify 2.0 build became the reference point for what followed. When bareMinerals came to us next, we reused elements of the Laura Mercier code to get the brand live ahead of schedule. BUXOM's design brief called for something visually louder than either sibling brand. The underlying build still drew on the same base.
That reuse is the part of the story that matters most for a multi-brand group weighing the same move. A shared foundation lets every subsequent brand launch faster and cheaper, because the group isn't solving the same infrastructure problems three separate times. Compounding a single asset across brands is one of the main mechanisms by which platform consolidation lowers total cost of ownership.
A base coat built for growth
For a multi-brand company, the store management layer the brand teams use every day carries more of the engineering complexity than the storefront a shopper actually sees. We built the theme to be regional-ready and integration-flexible from the start, so that when bareMinerals and Laura Mercier needed to launch local stores, the work was largely configuration instead of custom development.
That flexibility shows up in a few concrete capabilities:
- Regional storefronts that local teams can spin up on the shared theme (four for bareMinerals so far, more than ten for Laura Mercier), each with its own inventory, merchandising, and marketing strategy
- Integrations local teams can toggle on and off per store, reducing how often they need developer support to manage day-to-day operations
- Full internationalization across both frontend and backend, supporting multiple languages and currencies from a single codebase
- A custom inventory connector built for Laura Mercier to sync stock across channels, replacing a prior setup that couldn't keep pace with the brand's expansion
None of this is visible to a customer browsing any single brand's site. It's also where the TCO reduction Orveon wanted actually gets delivered, since it determines how much ongoing developer time each brand needs just to keep operating.
Different faces, same formula
bareMinerals, Laura Mercier, and BUXOM each built a storefront suited to its own customer, on top of the same shared platform. bareMinerals uses modular grid blocks and video galleries that let its team mix and rearrange content for new launches without touching code. Laura Mercier's site is built around Virtual Try-On and shade-matching quizzes, live chat, and shade-family storage at registration, reflecting a brand whose customers make considered, color-specific decisions. BUXOM approaches their storefront with a retro-futurist design inspired by early-internet and 2000s aesthetics, complete with glowing, hovering neon elements aimed at a younger audience than either sibling brand.
Design that ambitious still has to perform on a shared theme, and BUXOM's build is the clearest example of what that takes. Neon, hover, and glow effects add real weight to a page: loaded all at once, they slow it down and work against the reason a brand replatforms in the first place. We built BUXOM's navigation to load progressively as a shopper scrolls, rather than all at once, and did it without external animation libraries to avoid the added overhead.
A foundation worth building on
The results tracked with the strategy. bareMinerals saw a 15.1% increase in average order value, a 25.5% increase in conversion, an 18.4% decrease in bounce rate, and a 40.7% decrease in page load time after its migration. Laura Mercier saw a 38% increase in average order value and a 22% increase in revenue.
What Orveon's platform strategy ultimately demonstrates is that consolidation comes down to deciding what to standardize and what to leave to each brand. Backend systems, like inventory syncing, integrations, and personalization tooling, can be shared across a portfolio. What customers actually see should stay accountable to that brand alone.
If your organization is weighing a similar consolidation, or wondering whether Shopify can actually hold onto what makes your brands distinct from one another, talk to our expert team, we’d be happy to help you.
