Case study: building the UKIYO haircare store on Shopify

Why UKIYO as a case study?

Because it's a store we can show you in full. FOUNDR built the website and Shopify haircare store for UKIYO, a salon and haircare brand at 28 Helwick Street, Wānaka, and we still look after it. Every decision below has been tested against real orders, real stock and real bookings.

Crew Stylists in Queenstown runs on a site we built too (crewstylists.co.nz). Same thinking, different town.

What was the brief?

A salon that sells professional haircare has two jobs online, and most salon sites only do one of them. The brief was to do both on one site:

• Sell haircare properly. A real store with professional brands, not a page of product photos with a "call to order" line.
• Fill the appointment book. Get people from "who should do my colour?" to a confirmed booking in as few taps as possible.
• Keep stock honest. Products sell over the counter in the salon and online. Both systems need to agree, or you sell something you don't have.
• Be easy to run. The team are stylists, not web managers. Updating a price or a banner can't need a developer.

Why Shopify for a salon haircare store?

We looked at keeping everything inside the booking system and bolting a shop on the side. It doesn't hold up once you carry hundreds of products across several brands. Shopify gave us:

• proper collections, filters and search for a large catalogue
• a checkout people already trust, with NZ shipping rules and GST handled in the store settings
• gift cards that work online out of the box
• an Admin API we could connect to Kitomba, the salon's booking and point-of-sale system

Kitomba stays in charge of appointments and in-salon sales. Shopify runs the online store. The website's job is to connect them so a customer never notices there are two systems.

What did we actually build?

Here's what's live on ukiyo.co.nz today.

Feature	What it does
Haircare store	Several hundred products from Kérastase, Wella Professionals, Sebastian Professional, Redken, evo, ANGEL, ghd and others
Three ways to shop	By brand, by concern (blonde, damaged, dry, frizzy, fine, curly, scalp, thinning) and by product type
Routine bundles	16 complete Kérastase and Sebastian routines, priced below RRP
Free NZ shipping	Free on orders of $75 or more, a $9 flat rate below that, rural included
Stylist profiles	A page per stylist with their specialties, their product picks and a "Book with" button
Kitomba booking links	Book buttons across the site go straight into Kitomba online booking
Services and price list	Service pages with "from" prices, plus a full price list
Gift cards	Digital haircare gift cards for the online store, and salon vouchers for appointments
Journal	Stylist guides and product advice, written to answer the questions customers search
Stock sync	A Kitomba to Shopify reconciliation so salon sales and online sales don't drift apart

Collections built around how people shop

Nobody walks into a salon and asks for "the Kérastase Genesis range". They say their hair is falling out, or their blonde has gone brassy. So the menu leads with concern as well as brand. Someone with thinning hair lands on a short list a stylist would actually recommend, instead of scrolling the whole catalogue.

Routine bundles

Bundles are the feature we'd point other salon owners to first. Each one is a full routine from one range (shampoo, conditioner, mask and treatment) put together by the stylists and sold as a single product below RRP. There are 11 Kérastase routines and 5 Sebastian routines. The Sebastian routines are 22% off with a free Kérastase travel duo. The bundle collection also answers the questions people ask at the basin: which brand, which conditioner, what order to use it in.

A bundle is easier to choose than four separate products, and it matches how stylists recommend haircare in the chair. It's a better experience and a bigger basket.

Stylist profiles that lead to a booking

Every stylist has a profile page: who they are, what they're known for, what to expect in their chair, and "what they reach for", a short list of the products they use behind the chair, each with an add-to-cart button. The page ends with "Book with" that stylist and a note on how far ahead they book out.

That one page does three things. It helps a new client choose a stylist. It sells the products that stylist recommends. And it sends the client into Kitomba's booking flow with the decision already made.

Kitomba booking, not a rebuilt booking system

We didn't rebuild booking. Kitomba already holds the appointment book, staff rosters and client history, and duplicating that would create two sources of truth. Instead the "Book" buttons, in the header, on service pages and on each stylist profile, link straight into Kitomba's online booking. The announcement bar says it plainly: book your appointment online via Kitomba.

Free NZ shipping, written so people believe it

The threshold sits at $75, a level a single routine bundle clears. It's in the announcement bar, in the shop menu and in a short shipping policy anyone can read in 20 seconds: dispatched from the Wānaka studio, usually next business day, $9 flat anywhere in NZ including rural, 1 to 4 business days, tracked. No fine print about rural surcharges, because there aren't any.

Kitomba to Shopify stock sync

This is the part most salons skip, and it's the part that causes the most grief. A bottle of shampoo sells over the counter in Wānaka on Tuesday. If Shopify doesn't know, someone in Auckland can buy the same bottle online on Wednesday.

FOUNDR built a reconciliation between the two systems. It reads in-salon product sales from Kitomba and online orders from Shopify, matches products between them, and adjusts stock so both agree. Matching is the hard part: the same product can be named differently in each system, so we match on product codes and keep an override list for the stragglers.

What would we do differently?

Honest answers, including the things we'd change:

• Plan the stock sync on day one. We added it after the store was live. If you sell in a salon and online, design product codes for matching from the start.
• Keep a person in the loop on stock. An automated sync that's wrong is worse than none. UKIYO's runs as a checked reconciliation and we're still tuning it, because getting stock right matters more than getting it fast.
• Build bundles earlier. They do the selling a stylist would do at the basin. We'd launch with them next time.

Is a store like this right for your business?

The pattern suits any business that sells products and books appointments: salons, barbers, beauty and brow studios, clinics, gyms with retail. If that's you, here's a quick checklist before you brief anyone:

• Which booking or point-of-sale system do you use, and does it have online booking links or an API?
• Roughly how many products will you sell online, and do you have clean product data from your suppliers?
• Can your team describe what each staff member is known for? That's your profile pages.
• What's your free shipping threshold, and does it sit just above one typical order?
• Who updates prices, banners and promotions each month?

What does a build like this cost?

A store like this starts with our $990 website base, which includes an online shop for up to 25 products from one brand. Larger catalogues, more brands and migrations with redirects are quoted in a free, fixed-price proposal. Stock sync with a booking or point-of-sale system is scoped separately, because it depends on what that system allows. You can pay in full or over 3, 6, 9 or 12 months with no extra fees. Shopify's own plan is billed by Shopify; the Basic plan is about NZ$65 a month.

If you run a salon, our salon page covers what we build for salons. To get a number for your own store, use price your project. After launch, change requests go through the client portal.