Justmylook is a family-run, pure-play beauty retailer based in Yorkshire. It has grown into one of the UK’s biggest online beauty destinations, carrying more than 17,000 products from over 450 brands, all stored and fulfilled from its own warehouse. Its core customer is a trend-led shopper aged 18 to 35, and its trading calendar moves fast. After moving from a legacy platform to Shopify in October 2024, founder and managing director Luke Williams saw every key metric climb, giving the team the stability to handle peak demand, the speed to run complex promotions, and the confidence to plan its next stage of growth.
With Shopify, Justmylook saw results fast:
- Recorded its first-ever £1 million-plus day in sales on Black Friday, with demand so strong the team switched off advertising to keep up with orders
- Migrated 17,000 products from 450 brands in roughly six months, going live before peak Q4 trading
The challenge: legacy tech buckling before peak
Justmylook had watched Shopify for years before making a move. As a multi-brand retailer working across several verticals, the team assumed the platform was built mainly for direct-to-consumer brands, and questioned whether it could hold a catalogue of their size.
The real pressure was building inside the business. Conversations about the website had become a cycle of fixing one bug, then the next. Luke calls it “a leaky bucket effect.” With Q4 approaching, the team worried their existing technology would not survive the traffic that peak trading brings. Replatforming an ecommerce business is one of the biggest risks an online retailer can take, but for Justmylook, standing still had become the bigger risk.
“It was critical that we migrated to Shopify before Q4,” Luke said. “Our previous platform simply couldn’t support our growth or our traffic, we were certain it would have buckled under the pressure of peak trading.”
That maintenance cycle also drained time the team would rather have spent on customers. Every internal conversation about the site was a list of things to patch, not things to build.
The solution: a six-month migration before Q4
The team tested the waters first. Before committing the full catalogue, Justmylook ran one of its direct-to-consumer brands on Shopify to get hands-on with the tools. That trial gave them the confidence that the platform could handle a merchant of their scale.
From there, they moved fast. Justmylook decided to migrate in April 2024 and went live on October 16, a tighter timeline than most businesses attempt for a catalogue this size. Shopify’s tooling helped the team automate work that would otherwise have stayed manual. Once live, the team’s focus shifted from fixing bugs to improving the storefront, using simple app integrations and access to Liquid to build a distinctive experience for shoppers.
“Shopify gave us a brilliant foundation to build on,” Luke said. “From there it was a case of how far we could push it. The apps integrate effortlessly, and having access to Liquid means we can create a genuinely unique experience for our customers.”
The app ecosystem now sits at the centre of how Justmylook runs a complex promotional calendar. The team uses Planit Promotions to manage 600 to 700 concurrent offers, from three-for-twos to gifts with purchase, each governed by the individual guidelines of all 450 brands they stock. They run their CRM through Klaviyo, sending Black Friday campaigns to a list of 1.6 to 1.7 million opted-in customers. For day-to-day work, the team leans on Shopify’s AI assistant, Sidekick, to pull data, forecast volumes, and answer questions that once meant pulling reports manually or waiting on support.
I love Sidekick, it’s like a little friend on my shoulder
“Before, pulling that data was a manual job, manipulating spreadsheets, drawing from various sources, and conflating it all. Sidekick smooths out the entire process and leaves more time to focus on what counts,” Luke said.
The result: record trading under peak pressure
The migration changed how Justmylook operates. Luke describes it as the single moment that changed the trajectory of the business, with every KPI climbing on the back of the move. Just as important, the team could redirect the hours it used to spend on bug fixes toward the customer journey, and move faster on new ideas through one-click app integrations rather than multi-month custom builds.
The clearest proof came at peak. On Black Friday, Justmylook recorded its first-ever £1 million-plus day in sales. Demand ran so far past forecast that the team turned off advertising, because they did not yet have the resource to fulfil that volume of orders.
We had our first ever million-pound day. We did so well we had to turn the ads off just to keep up. Our old platform simply would not have been able to cope.
AI has added to those gains. Justmylook now uses AI to draft product listings and proofread copy, with a person still finishing the work, and has dropped a standing SEO agency retainer in favour of AI suggestions the team reviews and applies in house. They are also thinking about how shoppers discover products through AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude, and Luke sees Shopify’s pace of innovation as a way to keep Justmylook ahead of that shift.