Shop Canadian Beauty

August Strategy rebuilt Shop Canadian Beauty on Shopify, pairing a directory of more than 120 independent Canadian beauty brands with a curated shop where people buy from 14 of them in one checkout.

Shop Canadian Beauty began in February 2025, when tariffs took effect and a group chat of Canadian beauty founders became a public directory to help people find the brands made here at home. More than 100 brands joined within weeks, and the Globe and Mail, Business of Fashion, ELLE Canada and CTV’s The Social covered it. As of November 2026, almost 7,000 people visit every 90 days, up 42%, with more than a third arriving from search and more of them ready to buy. Every order ships from the brand that made it.

Results

• Visitors up 42%: almost 7,000 every 90 days as of November 2026
• More than a third of visitors arrive from search
• All 186 URLs from the old site redirect in one hop
• Image weight on Shop All cut in half

The directory had earned its audience, so it stays open to every brand that meets the Canadian Beauty Standard: majority Canadian-owned, headquartered in Canada and making at least half of its finished products here. The shop sits beside it without stocking a single product. It runs on Shopify Collective, so each brand keeps its own prices and inventory and ships its own orders. The design challenge was making 14 brands, each photographed and written in its own way, read as one considered store. We brought their products into a single visual world, wrote one shared vocabulary for categories, skin needs and ingredients, and built the pages around how people shop for beauty now: by concern, by ingredient and by province, often starting from a question typed into a search bar or an AI assistant.