Keune Haircosmetics is an international hair care brand. Jan Keune founded the company in 1922 in Amsterdam, developing the first perm lotion. His son George is now 96, but still comes to the headquarters in Soest four days a week. This is where Keune has its warehouse, but also its factory and laboratory.
"Everything happens here," says Pauline van Enschot, Global Head of Digital. "We develop everything in-house. The formulas, the production, all in one place."
This is also home to the Keune Academy, where hairdressers are trained to get the most out of the products. The hairdresser is central to everything Keune does. "You won't find us in drugstores or department stores," says Pauline. "That's one of the key ways we distinguish ourselves as professional hair care. Keune will always stay loyal to the hairdresser or hairstylist. Everything we do has to be in their interest too."
90 countries, no blueprint
Keune is available in more than 90 countries. In the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Germany, among others, Keune has its own offices. There, they handle everything themselves — from marketing to distribution. In other countries, they work with licence holders who have exclusive rights for a region. And in yet other countries, distributors purchase the products and sell them locally.
Headless as the answer
The brief to Ask Phill in 2021: build a webshop on Shopify that works in dozens of languages, with local teams managing their own content and a kickback system that automatically links salons to orders.
The Redesign
In 2025, Keune decided it was time for a refreshed website, coinciding with the launch of a completely renewed care line — the largest part of their range. New formulas, new packaging, new product photography.
For every merchant, Ask Phill develops something unique. For Keune, that was headless.
With a traditional webshop, the front end and back end are tied together in one platform. With headless, they're decoupled. It provides freedom you don't have with a standard platform — suited for complex situations like this one.
Behind the scenes, 11 different Shopify stores run connected to one codebase and one CMS. Each country has different rules for who can manage which content.
"The complexity lies in that fragmented landscape," says Martijn. "Normally you see one brand with multiple languages, with one team managing everything centrally. This is very decentralised. You can be very specific: this person has access to this language but not that one. And then within languages, you can also determine which content can and cannot be edited."
That requires an architecture flexible enough for local differences, but robust enough for a consistent brand experience.
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2x
Custom-built features
3
Languages
1x
Seamless online/offline experience
Revamping Vanilia's online store was about more than just aesthetics – it was about creating an immersive experience that mirrors the charm of their retail spaces. The decision to migrate to Shopify 2.0 was driven by the need for technical excellence and scalability, as the previous store's performance lagged behind competitors. Starting from scratch allowed us to introduce two standout features – a 'shop the look' option for a more engaging shopping experience and a wishlist feature promoting customer loyalty. Our commitment to performance and speed led us to build a custom, lightweight solution for the wishlist, ensuring a seamless online experience for Vanilia's customers.
Pink Gellac
Rebrand Meets a Scalable Shopify Platform
Pink Gellac didn't invent nail polish, it invented a category. Thirteen years ago the Dutch brand brought professional-grade gel manicures out of the salon and into a box that ships to your door, turning a salon appointment into a five-minute ritual anyone could do at home. That first-mover edge built a loyal following across Europe, but by 2026 Pink Gellac was competing in a market it had created and everyone else had since copied.
In July 2026 it responded with Colour Your Confidence, a rebrand built around self-expression rather than product specs, developed with creative agency Fitzroy. A repositioning at that scale doesn't stop at the logo, and that's what brought Pink Gellac back to Ask Phill, its e-commerce partner of more than four years.
Pink Gellac's storefront ran on a fully custom Shopify theme that, four years in, was hard to keep current with Shopify's own release pace: every platform update meant re-testing bespoke code first. That mattered because the rebrand had a fixed July 2026 deadline for a relaunch running in parallel with a separate creative agency, and the contract to rebuild the site wasn't signed until early April, leaving 10 weeks to deliver a platform that could carry new commercial tools like member pricing and a loyalty wallet card that the old theme couldn't easily absorb. Slip the platform, and the wider transformation Pink Gellac was calling New Pink Gellac slipped with it.
We rebuilt the store on the Ask Phill Accelerator (APA), our base theme architecture, with Pink Gellac's customizations layered on top rather than built as another one-off theme, so the site keeps receiving our automated base updates instead of freezing the way the old site had. It stayed server-rendered Liquid with a lightweight component JS layer: with a 10-week runway and a client team that needed to keep working in Shopify's own theme editor, APA was the way to go.
Shopify Payments and Shopify Markets carry commerce across Pink Gellac's 8 markets, 4 languages, and 3 currencies, with iDEAL, Klarna, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and cards at checkout, and content living in metaobjects and metafields. For search and discovery we chose Voyado Elevate over native Shopify search, the only way to merchandise, track, and price by member status consistently across eight markets, with Klaviyo, LoyaltyLion, Flowbox, and Appointo built in around it.
The build shipped fourteen distinct features in 10 weeks: member pricing across product pages and Voyado's collection grids, a digital membership card with Apple and Google Wallet passes, a gel-polish colour picker with texture swatches, a volume picker, and a full Build Your Own Kit configurator, alongside a store locator with map and detail pages, a reseller map, an in-store appointment booking bar, a pre-order flow, a reviews suite, Flowbox inspiration galleries, a comparison table, a wishlist, and Klaviyo newsletter and back-in-stock modals.
Three new integrations carried the most engineering weight. Voyado Elevate is the entire search and discovery layer, predictive search, results, collection grids, and tracking, with its feed also carrying per-market member and retail pricing. LoyaltyLion wires loyalty status into member-only pricing and messaging, including the wallet member card, across Pink Gellac's consumer markets. Flowbox powers shoppable UGC galleries on product and inspiration pages, configured per store through metaobjects.
The hardest problem was keeping member pricing correct on Voyado's own collection grids, since Voyado renders PLP prices from its own feed rather than Shopify's native pricing. We tracked down a currency mismatch between that feed and the shopper's active Shopify market, then built a dedicated member-price layer on the Voyado cards, backed by per-market pricing data in the feed itself. None of that exists out of the box: Shopify has no native concept of member pricing, so we engineered one that holds across Shopify pages and a third-party search grid in eight markets, and the theme issues wallet passes directly. The delivery model is arguably the bigger first, a fully customized storefront that keeps receiving automated base-theme updates instead of freezing in place.
Because the rebuild happened inside Pink Gellac's existing store, products, customers, and orders never moved: no data migration, no redirects, and cutover was a theme publish with zero downtime. Content moved into metaobjects and metafields, and translations migrated programmatically through the Admin API, matched by content digest. Performance was designed in from the start: critical CSS inlined per section, minimal client JS, images through Shopify's CDN, Git-based deploys that take minutes, and peak load absorbed natively by Shopify's infrastructure.
+14% Added-to-Cart / +15% Conversion Rate / +13% Gross Sales
Those are the numbers from the first month after the July 2026 launch, delivered on a rebrand built in a single 10-week window. The lift starts at add-to-cart, meaning the new colour picker, volume picker, and member pricing are doing their job of moving a shopper from browsing to committing, and it carries through to conversion and gross sales.
"Ask Phill is strong in Shopify and in reinventing itself with everything AI has to offer. Pink Gellac sees Ask Phill as a strategic knowledge partner, an accelerator for our e-commerce potential," says Sander Groenendijk, Chief Finance & Operations Officer at Pink Gellac.
For a launch running alongside a separate creative rebrand with a fixed date to hit, a smooth launch and immediate movement on the metrics that matter is exactly what Pink Gellac needed.
Pink Gellac's next milestone is already set: an further optimised Build Your Own Kit experience, building on the configurator that shipped with the relaunch. Longer term, the brand is looking at AI to take over more of its day-to-day analysis, optimization, and content, freeing its team to focus on the commercial model behind it, Traffic x Conversion x Order Value = Revenue, rather than the execution underneath it.
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