The Makeup Co: Custom Beauty Ecommerce Platform

The Makeup Co is a luxury Australian makeup retailer serving professional artists, students, and retail customers. AL Phesda Interactive designed and developed a custom ecommerce platform end-to-end: storefront, Pro Membership, brand hubs, kits, Stripe payments, transactional email, and the admin CMS staff use every day.

This was not a theme on Shopify. It is a purpose-built commerce system for how beauty brands actually sell: deep category trees, trade pricing, academy kits, and a storefront that still feels premium.

The brief

Replace a WordPress and WooCommerce stack with a platform the team could own. Keep the luxury visual language. Rebuild catalogue, checkout, accounts, wholesale membership, kits, and content editing so staff could publish without a developer for every change.

If you sell makeup, hair, or salon products and off-the-shelf ecommerce keeps fighting your workflows, this is the kind of build we do. Book a Discovery Session and we will map what a custom store should look like for your brand.

Multi-brand shopping that feels editorial

The Makeup Co carries multiple pro brands under one roof. We built dedicated brand hubs for Bulk Lashes, ESUM, Kett Cosmetics, and Paintbox, each with its own hero, value props, mega-menu colour, and featured product grids. Shoppers browse by brand without losing the parent store identity.

Category trees power the mega-menu and landing pages. A brand like Bulk Lashes can surface Clusters, Individuals, and Strips as first-class paths. Kett Cosmetics can lead with inclusive shade ranges and set-ready coverage messaging that matches how artists actually shop.

Pro Membership for artists and students

Retail pricing alone was never enough. Makeup artists and students need verified trade access. We built Pro Membership as a first-class product: apply online, upload credentials, get reviewed in admin, then unlock tiered auto-discounts across the catalogue.

Applicants choose makeup artist or student, create an account in one flow, and submit business details for review. Staff approve, request more information, or reject from the same admin they use for orders. Legacy wholesale and trade routes consolidate into this single membership model.

On top of membership, the platform supports discount codes with tier allowlists, brand-specific Pro percentages, and product kits including fixed kits, build-your-own kits, and composite academy kits with mutually exclusive brand slots.

Admin CMS built for beauty operations

Staff run the business from a custom admin at themakeup.co/admin. Products, categories, inventory, orders, discount codes, media, homepage, brand hubs, blog, email templates, customers, and Pro applications all live in one console.

Catalogue changes publish to the storefront instantly. Inventory tracks SKUs with low-stock alerts and reservation logic at checkout. Orders generate Australian tax invoices. Transactional email runs through Resend on a verified domain, with templates editable in the CMS for shipping, refunds, abandoned carts, membership lifecycle, and more.

Salon booking is built into the same system and can be enabled when the client is ready for appointments alongside ecommerce. One platform for shop, membership, content, and optional bookings.

Technical architecture

• Frontend: Next.js 16 (App Router), React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, motion-driven storefront on Vercel Sydney.
• Commerce data: Firebase Auth, Firestore, and Storage as the live catalogue, orders, CMS, and membership backend.
• Payments: Stripe PaymentIntents with embedded Elements, AUD pricing, webhook fulfillment, refunds, and saved payment methods.
• Email: Resend on contact.themakeup.co for orders, membership, abandoned cart, and operational alerts.
• Ops: PDF tax invoices, inventory reservation cron, abandoned-cart recovery, Sentry monitoring, and CI with lint, tests, and bundle budgets.

We migrated away from WordPress and WooCommerce as the live shop while preserving the luxury design language, so the brand kept its look and gained a backend that matches how the business actually works.

What we delivered

• Live custom storefront at themakeup.co with predictive search, cart, account, and Stripe checkout.
• Multi-brand hubs and category-driven merchandising for pro beauty catalogues.
• Pro Membership application, review, and tiered pricing for artists and students.
• Fixed, build-your-own, and composite kit commerce for academy and studio workflows.
• Full admin CMS for products, inventory, orders, invoices, email templates, and content.
• Optional salon booking module wired into the same operational console.

If your beauty, salon, or wholesale brand has outgrown templates, we can design and build a store that fits your catalogue, memberships, and operations. Explore our website design and development and custom app development, or book a free Discovery Session and leave with a clear build plan.