A facial studio's treatments, booking, payments and shop, on one site that feeds its diary.
The Facialist
The job
The Facialist is a facial studio at City Works Depot in Auckland, founded in 2014. Clients booked on a separate site run by the booking software, and the shop lived on an ageing Shopify theme. You could read about a facial in one place, then get sent somewhere else to pay for it.
The job was to bring all of it under one roof, and make it feel like the studio does.
Our part
Design, Shopify build, booking, copy, migration and tracking.
Build started 15 October 2026. Live 30 October 2026.
This one's ours
The Facialist is our own family business, so we weren't guessing how the studio works, and we still live with the result. It's also why we can show you what's behind it.
Booking that starts on the site
Five steps: treatment, length and extras, facialist, day and time, details. Availability comes live from Zenoti. Clients then pay on Zenoti's secure card page, with a gift voucher if they have one, and come back to a confirmation. Paid bookings land in the studio's diary. If someone doesn't finish paying, their time is released after 20 minutes so the slot isn't lost.
A menu people can actually read
Every treatment has its own page, with what happens, how long it takes, what it costs and who it suits. Anyone unsure can answer three questions and get pointed to a facial.
A shop that follows the treatment room
We rewrote the copy on 179 product pages and checked ingredients and sizes against outside sources for 174 of them. Clients can shop by concern or routine, and each product suggests what goes with it.
Gift cards, sorted
Gift cards had been spread across a physical product and a separate email voucher. One three-step chooser now covers both, along with amount and treatment cards.
A move with nothing left behind
Old pages, retired collections and old links were redirected. Before launch we checked 412 pages for errors, tested 29 page types on desktop and phone, and ran real bookings and refunds through card and gift voucher.
Tracking that counts bookings
Paid bookings are reported to Meta from the server, and its booking ads now optimise toward appointments that were actually paid for, rather than people clicking through to a booking page.
Since launch
Launch was the start of the work. In the first week, reports from the front desk led us to a bug in what happens when someone backs out of the card page, and we read the booking funnel step by step and by traffic source to see where people were leaving. Fixes went live or into testing the same week, and we trimmed the ads and search terms that weren't earning their spend.
Results
It's too early to claim any. The site went live on 30 October 2026, and a few weeks of bookings can't be separated from season and ad spend. We'll publish the numbers here once there's a fair comparison.