From slow and generic to fast and personal — a mobile experience worth opening every day.
Dot & Key is a leading ingredient-led Indian skincare brand known for science-backed formulations and a highly engaged digital community. As mobile commerce became the dominant channel, the brand needed an app experience that could match the precision and personality of its products.
The existing app, built on Shopify App Maker, had served as a starting point — but not a destination. Performance was sluggish, content management was rigid, and the platform simply couldn't support the kind of app-exclusive personalisation the brand wanted to offer. The brief was to build something custom, capable, and worthy of the community that had grown around the brand.
Three people were let down by the old app every day. The rebuild put each of them at the centre of every technical decision.
Shoppers found the app too slow and unreliable to use with confidence, defaulting back to the website for purchases. App-exclusive deals went undiscovered because the experience itself wasn't smooth enough to stay in.
📱 Slow, unreliable app experienceMarketing managers were blocked from updating app content or launching exclusive offers without going through a multi-day development cycle. Campaign windows regularly closed before changes went live.
⏳ Content updates blocked by dev cyclesProduct managers were unable to offer differentiated pricing for app users because the platform had no mechanism to support it. Wishlist data also reset on reinstall, erasing retention signals the team had no way to recover or act on.
🚫 Platform can't support the product visionDot & Key's growth had outpaced what Shopify App Maker could deliver. The platform's performance ceiling was visible to every shopper, its content management rigidity frustrated every campaign, and its architecture blocked the personalisation ambitions the product team had been building toward.
The missing features weren't edge cases — they were table stakes for a brand competing at this level. Persistent wishlists, differentiated pricing, automated refunds, and real-time content control had all been requested and denied by the platform's limitations. A custom build wasn't optional; it was overdue.
“Every day on the old platform was a day the brand promised more than its app could deliver.”
The custom build was designed around the people who would use it daily — a shopper who needed speed, a marketer who needed agility, and a PM who needed capability.
Built a bespoke mobile app using React Native to deliver the cross-platform performance and responsiveness Pooja expected — an app that actually feels like it belongs on her phone.
Human-CentricityIntegrated Strapi as a headless CMS so Neha's team can update collections, PDPs, offers, and homepage content without a single developer ticket.
Human-CentricityDeveloped a middleware-based dual-cart architecture using Shopify and Shopflo to support dynamic, app-exclusive pricing — finally giving Rahul's team the personalisation lever they'd been asking for.
SustainabilityBuilt custom backend logic to preserve wishlist state across sessions and reinstalls — so the signals users leave behind actually persist and can be acted on.
ResilienceImplemented automated refund processing to remove manual intervention from a high-frequency operational task — reducing support load and improving customer trust.
ResilienceDesigned the architecture for extensibility — new features, integrations, and product categories can be added without structural rebuilds.
SustainabilityPooja now has an app that opens fast, feels smooth, and surfaces deals made specifically for app users. The experience finally matches the brand she already trusts.
Neha's team can push content, offers, and collection changes the moment a campaign goes live — not after a development cycle that misses the window.
Rahul's roadmap is no longer bottlenecked by platform limitations. Differentiated pricing, persistent wishlists, and custom workflows are live — and the architecture supports whatever comes next.
Automated refunds and backend workflow logic removed a layer of manual operations that was quietly consuming team time and eroding customer trust at the same time.
Custom-built apps that go beyond what platforms allow — because your brand's mobile experience shouldn't be somebody else's product decision.