Bombay Shaving Company Grew Online Revenue 20x After Leaving Magento

In 2015, Shantanu Deshpande left a job at McKinsey & Company to sell razors. Not a razor subscription app, not a marketplace play — a premium, six-part shaving kit built around a weighted-handle safety razor and Japanese-engineered blades, launched in November 2016 at a price, roughly Rs 3,500, that assumed Indian men would pay a real premium for a grooming ritual the category had never really offered them. It was a reasonable enough bet that it raised outside capital almost immediately. It was also, for its first three years, a business that struggled to get customers to come back: FY17 averaged around Rs 18 lakh a month in revenue, FY18 grew to roughly Rs 5 crore, and only about one in ten customers ever placed a second order. Somewhere underneath that repeat-rate problem sat a second, quieter one — a Magento-based backend that had been adequate for a single hero SKU and was becoming a genuine liability as the company tried to become something bigger. By the time Bombay Shaving Company migrated to Shopify Plus in 2021, it wasn't chasing a nicer storefront. It was trying to fix a platform that had started actively capping how fast the business could move.

A premium product with a conversion problem nobody could quite name

The early version of Bombay Shaving Company looked, from the outside, like it was doing everything right. It had a differentiated product in a category — men's grooming — that was still dominated by mass-market cartridge razors sold on price. It had institutional backing: Colgate-Palmolive led a Series A round in August 2018, taking a roughly 14% stake for about Rs 18 crore, with existing investor Fireside Ventures also participating — the kind of validation that doesn't attach itself to a company with no underlying signal. And by the account documented in an Ivey Business School case study on the brand, set in January 2020, the company's in-house digital team was running a genuinely sophisticated marketing operation: conversion-rate testing, influencer marketing, heatmaps, keyword-cloud analysis, structured email flows. None of it was translating into sales at the rate it should have. The case study puts the number plainly — roughly 13 conversions per 1,000 visitors, a 1.3% conversion rate, well under where a direct-to-consumer brand with this much marketing sophistication should have landed. The case study frames this as a marketing and customer-journey problem, and it likely was, in part. But a marketing team can only convert as well as the site underneath it lets it, and by 2020 that site was starting to become the ceiling.

What was actually wrong with the Magento setup

Shopify's own case study on the brand is unusually specific about what the pre-migration platform got wrong, and none of it is exotic — it's the standard list of ways an early-stage Magento build calcifies as a company scales past the size it was built for. There was no standardized way to list a product or build a landing page; every new launch ran through a custom workflow, meaning creative assets had to be shared with the tech team and cycled through multiple rounds of feedback before a page went live. Case-study accounts of the brand describe product-page creation timelines stretching to several weeks for what should have been a routine catalog update — a genuine problem for a company whose growth strategy depended on shipping new SKUs and new bundles quickly enough to keep a fast-moving Indian D2C market interested. The more acute failure showed up during the company's monthly mega-sale events, where high traffic periodically pushed the platform past its stability threshold. When the site had issues during a sale, the fix wasn't a quick patch — it was, per the case study, an "immediate troubleshooting" process that could stretch into hour-long coordination calls while the sale itself continued to bleed conversions. For a company already averaging worse-than-benchmark conversion on a normal day, a platform that also degraded under exactly the traffic spikes a mega-sale was designed to generate was compounding the same problem twice.

The 2021 move, and what changed operationally

Bombay Shaving Company migrated to Shopify in 2021. The framing from Jayanth R, the company's General Manager and D2C Head, in Shopify's own case study, is telling for how unglamorous it is: "We wanted to focus on growth, not wrestle with our tech stack. Shopify offered us the stability, usability, and speed we needed to truly unlock our D2C potential." That's not a quote about a redesign or a new brand direction — it's a quote about wanting the platform to stop being the thing the team spent its time on. Operationally, the case study credits three specific changes for absorbing that workload: standardized page templates that cut new product-page launches from weeks down to hours, since teams no longer needed a bespoke build for every SKU; an integrated app stack — Easy Bundle Builder for building product bundles without custom development, Matrixify for bulk-managing discount codes at the scale a mega-sale requires, and Return Prime for handling the return and exchange volume that a growing order base generates; and built-in analytics and customer-segmentation tooling that let the team target churn reduction and repeat-purchase behavior directly, rather than reverse-engineering it from a system that wasn't built to expose that data easily.

The numbers that came out the other side

The headline result — a 150% uplift in conversion rate — is the number Shopify leads with, and it's the most direct rebuttal to the 1.3% figure the Ivey case study had documented roughly a year earlier: a platform that made product launches faster and stayed up during sales gave the existing marketing engine a floor to actually convert against. But the more revealing numbers sit underneath that headline. Online revenue grew 20x, which is a scale of growth that a conversion lift alone can't produce — it implies the platform was also unlocking traffic and catalog growth the old system had been throttling. Average order value grew 4x over the same period, consistent with a bundling and merchandising capability (via apps like Easy Bundle Builder) that the Magento setup's weeks-long page-build cycle had made impractical to iterate on. And the platform's ability to absorb a 20x traffic spike — handling more than 10,000 concurrent visitors without the site degrading — meant the monthly mega-sale events that used to trigger emergency troubleshooting calls instead became a routine operating rhythm: more than 50,000 orders processed in a single two-day sale window, with no disruption reported. None of these are independent wins. They read as one story — a company whose growth had been gated by its own infrastructure, finally given a platform that could keep pace with demand the brand was already capable of generating.

Bombae and the house-of-brands bet the new platform made possible

The Shopify migration happened alongside, not instead of, a bigger strategic pivot. By mid-2020, Deshpande has said publicly that the company realized it "didn't have a core" — the way Dairy Milk is synonymous with chocolate or Maggi with instant noodles, Bombay Shaving Company wasn't synonymous with anything specific enough. The team identified a much larger addressable opportunity sitting adjacent to men's shaving: women's hair removal, a market then estimated at roughly Rs 20,000 crore in India, of which about 95% ran through salons rather than any branded at-home product. Bombae, the company's women's hair-removal brand, launched in the third quarter of 2020, built around at-home devices and tiered trimmer pricing (Rs 699 through Rs 1,999). The repositioning was total: "We are neither men's shaving nor women's shaving," Deshpande has said. "We are a hair-removing company for all." The bet paid off directionally — Bombae has reportedly driven 40–45% of the company's overall growth since its 2022-era scale-up, according to the company's co-founder and COO Deepak Gupta. What made this kind of multi-brand expansion operationally tractable, rather than a second from-scratch platform build, was Shopify's expansion-stores model: the company now runs seven independent D2C brands sharing one unified backend, using the same standardized templates and operational playbooks the original migration established, rather than hiring a separate tech team for every new label. The platform decision made in 2021 to fix a conversion problem ended up being the same decision that made a multi-brand strategy launched a year earlier actually scalable.

Scaling past the storefront: funding, revenue, and an IPO on the horizon

The business built on top of that platform has kept compounding. Revenue climbed from roughly Rs 37.7 crore in FY21 to about Rs 110 crore in FY22, crossed Rs 200 crore in FY24 (Rs 225.85 crore in revenue from operations, per Entrackr's reporting, with losses narrowing 22% year-over-year to Rs 62.15 crore), and reached roughly Rs 271 crore in total revenue in FY25, with losses declining a further 6.5%. By late 2025, the company was citing an annualized revenue run-rate of roughly Rs 700 crore and had reportedly reached PAT profitability for the first time. That trajectory has been funded in stages rather than one large raise: the 2018 Colgate-Palmolive-led Series A, a subsequent $21 million Series C, and — most recently, in November 2025 — a Rs 136 crore round combining primary and secondary capital, led by existing investor Sixth Sense Ventures and joined by Deshpande himself alongside investors including former cricketer Rahul Dravid. Company leadership has framed that latest round explicitly as IPO preparation. "Two to one-and-a-half years, we should get ready," co-founder and COO Deepak Gupta has said, with the company targeting roughly Rs 150 crore in EBITDA and Rs 1,000 crore in annual revenue as the benchmarks it wants to clear before listing. None of that growth is a direct consequence of the 2021 Shopify migration — but a platform capable of launching new SKUs in hours instead of weeks, absorbing 20x traffic spikes, and running seven brands off one backend is a materially easier business to scale toward an IPO than the one the company was operating in January 2020.

What the platform migration didn't fix

It's worth being honest about the limits of what a platform change can do, because the existing metrics invite an overly clean narrative. Bombay Shaving Company today still runs 85–90% of its revenue through online channels, per Deepak Gupta's own account, with roughly 30% of total revenue now coming through quick-commerce platforms like Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy Instamart, and Flipkart Minutes, and a much smaller physical footprint — around 20 stores in metro malls and high streets — carrying the rest. That's a genuinely omnichannel business, but it's one still substantially built on the direct-to-consumer motion the Shopify migration was designed to support, which means the platform's limits are still the company's limits in a way a fully diversified retail business wouldn't be as exposed to. And the migration, unsurprisingly, didn't touch the parts of the business that live outside the storefront: on Trustpilot, bombayshavingcompany.com carries an aggregate 3.1-out-of-5 "Average" rating, and both Trustpilot and PissedConsumer reviews of the brand cite recurring complaints about order cancellations, delayed refunds, and slow customer-service response times — the kind of fulfillment and support friction that a faster, more stable storefront doesn't resolve on its own. A platform migration can remove drag from the parts of the funnel it controls: page speed, uptime, checkout, catalog velocity. It has no bearing on courier reliability, warehouse accuracy, or how quickly a support ticket gets answered, and a brand that treats "we moved to Shopify" as a complete fix for its customer-experience problems is solving half the equation and mistaking it for the whole thing.

What this means for a Shopify D2C brand

The transferable part of Bombay Shaving Company's story isn't the 150% or the 20x — those are outcomes specific to how badly the prior platform had been throttling this particular business. The transferable part is the diagnostic: a company with strong products, real institutional backing, and a genuinely sophisticated marketing operation was still converting at roughly half the rate it should have, and the root cause wasn't creative, targeting, or offer — it was a backend that made every product launch a multi-week project and every mega-sale a stability risk. Those are exactly the kind of problems that don't show up cleanly in a marketing dashboard, because they look like a conversion problem, an AOV problem, or a churn problem right up until someone traces them back to the platform underneath. If your team is routinely waiting weeks to ship a new product page, or treats every high-traffic sale as an incident-response exercise rather than a normal Tuesday, that's usually not a sign you need better campaigns — it's a sign the infrastructure has become the bottleneck, the way it had for Bombay Shaving Company through 2020. For a brand evaluating that exact fork, our guide to migrating to Shopify is the more tactical starting point; this case study is the evidence that the fix, when it's genuinely a platform problem, tends to compound across conversion, AOV, and how many brands you can credibly run on one backend at once — while leaving the parts of the business that were never the platform's job for someone to fix separately.