✅ Operational workload halved
✅ No revenue dip
✅ Minimal customer confusion during rebrand
Overview
SimsDirect (now Simify) was scaling globally but operating across two separate Shopify stores -SimsDirect for Australia and Simify for international markets. As both began competing in the Australian market, maintaining two parallel stores was creating operational complexity and fragmenting the brand. This problem would continue to grow as we scaled.
I pushed for and led the consolidation of both stores into a single global store, managing the migration strategy, customer communication, and experience continuity across the transition.
ROLE
Design Lead & Project Coordinator
PLATFORM
Shopify
TIMELINE
December 2024 - February 2025
COLLABORATORS
SEO Specialist · External Dev Team
The Problem
Although Simify was created to serve the international market, both stores were selling the same products and beginning to overlap in the Australian market. That created real friction:
Duplicate product and content management across two stores
Fragmented marketing and split analytics
Double the dev overhead
Brand confusion in the AU market as both names appeared side by side
The longer we maintained both, the worse it would get. It was a scaling problem and a brand problem at the same time.
The Risk
The original SimsDirect AU store was the primary revenue driver with six years of SEO equity behind it. Consolidating meant accepting real short-term risk of losing search rankings, confusing loyal customers, and potentially disrupting revenue during the transition.
It was risky enough that it took months of internal discussion before we committed.
The Key Decision
The most important design call was also the least visible one: don’t change anything.
Before migration, I brought the Simify store up to a one-to-one match with SimsDirect - same navigation, same structure, same experience. This meant that when existing SimsDirect customers landed on Simify for the first time, nothing felt unfamiliar. The rebrand was a name change, not an experience change.
Keeping the experience the same gave us one variable to manage instead of several. The customer communication followed the same logic: clear and direct about what was changing, what wasn’t, and why.
Impact
Operational workload roughly halved → one store, one email list, one brand for marketing material.
The perceived risk turned out to be greater than the actual impact - largely because the transition was structured carefully and the experience was kept deliberately familiar.
What I’d do differently
I’d push for consolidation sooner and build clearer internal modelling to quantify the risk earlier. Much of the delay came from fear of the unknown rather than concrete evidence that waiting was safer.