Case Study · Pinucci Ltd · 2010-2017
Founder · Platform Owner
Bringing the revenue channel in-house without pausing trade.
The Brief
The hard part was that the vendor being replaced was running the revenue channel. The website was agency-built and agency-held: every product update, content change and campaign adjustment went through an external party's queue and invoice, and for a business launching two collections a year against fixed manufacturing deadlines, the agency's calendar, not the collection calendar, set the pace. The decision: bring the platform in-house, migrate without disrupting trading, and unify online and in-store sales into one picture of the customer using SIPOC analysis.
The Approach
The stack was selected for in-house operability (Shopify as storefront, Magento in the mix, Elavon POS for in-store payments) and the migration was sequenced around the trading calendar, with the old channel held until the new one was proven. Integrating the POS with e-commerce meant every purchase, in-store or online, landed in one customer history: the data foundation that made the lifecycle marketing programme in the companion study possible. Catalogue operations ran at 5,000+ SKUs a year with product data from three countries managed at source, so quality problems surfaced early rather than at launch.
Fig. 01 · The operation, mapped to S I P O C
The Process swaps to in-house while the flow never stops.
- Manufacturers
- Italy, Spain, UK
- 5,000+ SKUs a year
- Two collection cycles
- External queue per change
- Invoice per update
- Agency's calendar set the pace
- Online and in-store data separate
- Platform: Shopify, Magento, Elavon POS, Mailchimp
- PR & marketing
- Lookbooks, fashion shows, trade events
- One unified customer record
- Collections shipped
- Zero launches missed
- D2C luxury buyers
- One customer, one record
SIPOC, a standard business-analysis tool, was used to map Pinucci's operations to its suppliers, inputs, process, outputs and customers, deciding what was safe to change. Every dependency was weighted and analysed before the new platform was brought in-house, without pausing trade, or any operations.
Recreated schematically from the operation's structure. No client-internal data reproduced.
Judgement Call
The dependency call. Reducing vendor dependency is easy to recommend and hard to execute when the vendor currently runs your revenue. The migration was justified with a founder's cost-benefit analysis (agency fees and delay costs against the one-off cost of migration and the ongoing cost of ownership) and made only when dependency cost exceeded ownership cost. The same instinct, applied in consulting work since, protects clients from black-box implementations where the partner holds the keys.
What Was Delivered
- A fully in-house commerce and marketing platform, operated without agency dependency.
- POS and e-commerce integration producing a single, unified customer purchase history
- A migration sequenced around immovable collection launches: none missed, no trading pause
- Product data quality managed at source across manufacturers in Italy, Spain and the UK
- The data foundation for the lifecycle automation programme (companion case study)
The Outcome
The business gained a scalable platform it fully controlled and removed a structural vendor risk. The unified data foundation enabled the lifecycle programme that delivered +10% year-on-year retention and +15% campaign efficiency. The transferable pattern: take ownership of what is strategic, integrate the data before automating on top of it, and sequence change around the calendar the business actually runs on.