Turning a marketplace-only brand into an owned Shopify storefront

Relying entirely on Amazon and Etsy meant Zinora had no direct relationship with its own customers and no protection against a single platform's policy changes.

Marcus's team built a Shopify storefront that mirrored the operational reliability of the marketplace listings — same inventory feed, same fulfillment times — while Priya's team redirected a portion of paid social spend toward the owned channel.

Within a year, direct-to-consumer sales became a meaningful share of total revenue, with a noticeably higher average order value than either marketplace, and an email list that now drives Zinora's own product launches ahead of any marketplace listing.