Solace Beverage launched on Shopify with subscriptions in five weeks.
A DTC beverage brand built in partnership with a creative agency of record. Full launch cycle: GTM, Recharge subscriptions, carrier-calculated shipping, Cloudflare cutover, and a phase-2 roadmap before the first ad spend.
// §01
The brief.
The brand came to us through the creative agency leading their launch. They had a launch date, a Recharge plan, and no engineering. We were brought in as the technical partner to ship the storefront without delaying the brand campaign.
The work spanned three integration surfaces that usually trip up first launches: Recharge subscriptions wired to product variants, carrier-calculated shipping with weight thresholds, and a full GTM event layer that the marketing team could measure against from day one.
$ cat ./constraints.txt
· Launch window non-negotiable, paid media already booked
· Subscription attach rate must be measurable in GA4 from hour one
· Mixed cart shipping (heavy + light SKUs) priced correctly
· Cloudflare DNS cutover with zero email downtime
· Phase 2 backlog documented before launch, not after
// §02
The approach.
Three phases. Five weeks. One senior dev, one BA, the creative agency on design and brand.
01
Scope
One week. Brand assets in, Recharge subscription logic mapped, carrier shipping rules drafted with the fulfillment partner.
02
Build
Three weeks. Storefront on Shopify Dawn (customized), Recharge widgets on PDP and cart, GTM container with 14 ecommerce events, carrier shipping API wired live.
03
Cutover
Cloudflare DNS swap on a Tuesday morning. Email records preserved via separate MX cutover the day prior. QA on real cards. Live by noon.
// §03
The stack.
// §04
The numbers.
Measured across the first 60 days post-launch. No legacy site to compare against; benchmarks are vs. category averages for DTC beverage launches.
SUBSCRIPTION ATTACH RATE
32%
category avg ~12%
MOBILE CVR
3.8%
category avg 1.9%
AOV
$58
subscription pricing
LCP P75 (MOBILE)
1.1s
Lighthouse 94
RECHARGE CHURN (M1)
4.2%
DTC benchmark ~8%
GTM EVENT COVERAGE
100%
14 events, all firing
“
Effectdev shipped the technical side faster than we built the launch campaign. Phase 2 was already documented when we asked for it.
— FOUNDER, AGENCY OF RECORD
// related/
More e-commerce commits.
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Launching a DTC brand?
Subscription-first storefronts ship in 4-6 weeks with us. Let's see if yours fits.