Mulmul, founded in 2018 by Harsh Hari Modi, has grown in a few years from a new entrant into a household name in Indian contemporary womenswear — 20+ stores across India, a catalogue spanning clothing, accessories, jewellery, and footwear, and a brand identity built on blending traditional craftsmanship with everyday wearability. Its move to Shopify in 2019 is, per Shopify's own case study, the infrastructure decision underneath a 10x increase in online sales and expansion into five international markets.
A performance problem that showed up before checkout ever did
The specific failure mode on Adobe Commerce is worth dwelling on because it's a common, underdiagnosed pattern: slow site speed wasn't primarily costing Mulmul conversions at checkout — it was degrading product discovery and navigation, the stages before a customer has even decided what they want to buy. A slow product listing page, slow filtering, slow image loading on a browse session doesn't just annoy a shopper; it actively suppresses how much of the catalogue they see before giving up, which compounds into fewer add-to-carts long before checkout friction ever becomes the visible problem.
This is a meaningfully different diagnosis than "checkout was broken," and it's one that's easy to miss if a team is only measuring cart abandonment rate. By the time a performance problem is visible in checkout-stage metrics, it's often already suppressed demand earlier in the funnel in ways that don't show up in that specific number at all.
If your speed problem is upstream of checkout, checkout-specific optimisation won't fix it — you need to measure and fix product discovery and browse-session performance specifically, not just the last mile.
The migration and what it unlocked
Mulmul's pivot to Shopify in 2019 is described in the case study as a genuine turning point, unlocking three specific capabilities: faster innovation cycles (shipping new features, campaigns, and catalogue changes without the previous platform's development drag), smoother day-to-day operations, and — critically for a brand with international ambitions — the agility to scale into new markets without each one requiring a bespoke technical project.
The "faster innovation cycles" phrase is doing a lot of work and is worth unpacking. On a platform where every catalogue restructure or campaign page needs developer time, a merchandising or marketing team's ideas get triaged and queued like engineering tickets — which means the ideas that actually ship are the ones that survive that queue, not necessarily the best ones. Moving that capability into the hands of the people who understand the product and the customer directly changes which ideas get tested at all, not just how fast they ship.
What Shopify Markets actually did for a five-country expansion
International expansion is often modelled as a series of from-scratch technical projects — one per country, each needing its own currency handling, payment methods, tax and duty logic, and often a semi-separate storefront. Shopify Markets collapses most of that into configuration rather than custom development: a single store can present local currency pricing, region-specific payment methods, and market-appropriate shipping and duty logic without maintaining parallel codebases per country.
For Mulmul specifically, this is what turned "expand into the US, UK, and Asia" from a multi-quarter engineering roadmap into something closer to a market-entry and localisation decision — which products to lead with, how to price for each region's willingness to pay, how to adapt product storytelling (a craftsmanship-and-heritage brand story lands differently with a UK customer than an Indian one) — rather than a purely technical one. The platform stopped being the constraint on how fast the brand could test a new market.
From 20+ Indian stores to five international markets
What makes Mulmul's story particularly relevant for other Indian D2C brands is the sequencing: the brand built real scale domestically first — 20+ physical stores plus a growing online channel — before using the same Shopify infrastructure to expand into international markets across the US, UK, and Asia. The platform didn't just support the existing Indian business better; it became the foundation that made international expansion a configuration problem rather than a from-scratch technical build for every new market.
This is a meaningfully different expansion model than building a separate international-specific stack, and it's the same underlying pattern Shopify Markets is designed to support: one platform, one team, multiple storefronts and currencies, rather than parallel infrastructure per region.
The results, and why the cost number matters as much as the growth number
Mulmul's headline result is a 10x increase in online sales since migrating — a number that, on its own, could be attributed to brand momentum as much as platform choice. Two other numbers make the platform's specific contribution clearer: a 2x increase in returning customer rate, which points to a materially better post-purchase and retention experience rather than just more first-time traffic, and a 67% reduction in technical implementation costs, which is a direct, unambiguous platform-efficiency number that has nothing to do with marketing or brand strength.
That cost reduction is worth sitting with: for a scaling D2C brand, technical implementation cost isn't just a line item — it's the tax on every future feature, campaign, and market launch. Cutting it by two-thirds doesn't just save money on the migration itself; it changes the unit economics of every subsequent product decision, because shipping the next idea costs a third of what it used to.
The returning-customer-rate doubling deserves its own scrutiny too, because "retention improved after a migration" is a claim that's easy to hand-wave and hard to actually attribute. The more defensible read: fixing the upstream speed problem (product discovery and navigation, not just checkout) meant more customers had a good enough first experience to come back at all, and a faster, more reliable mobile experience post-migration removed the specific friction — slow reloads, laggy filtering, inconsistent checkout — that's disproportionately likely to quietly push a first-time buyer toward a competitor on their second visit rather than back to Mulmul.
What this means for a brand planning international growth from India
Mulmul's sequence — fix the platform, prove the model domestically, then expand internationally on the same infrastructure — is a more capital-efficient path than building region-specific stacks or waiting until international demand forces an emergency replatform mid-expansion. The 67% cost reduction is the number worth taking most seriously if you're earlier in this journey: it's evidence that the platform choice compounds into every subsequent growth decision, not just the initial migration.
The broader pattern worth taking from both this and Libas's story is that Indian D2C brands increasingly don't need to choose between "build for India" and "build for international" as sequential, separate technical efforts. A platform decision made correctly the first time can serve both, which means the real strategic question shifts from a technical one to a market and brand one: not "can our stack handle a new country," but "is this the right country to enter next." For the specific mechanics of expanding into new markets on the same Shopify instance, see our guide to expanding to international markets on Shopify.
About this case study.
Did Carryup work with this brand?
No — Carryup did not work with Mulmul. This is independent analysis of publicly available information (official case studies, press coverage, and reported figures — see the sources cited on this page), written to extract lessons transferable to other Shopify D2C brands. Our own client work lives on the Work page, with real, attributable results.
Does this apply if my brand is a different size or category?
The underlying mechanics — infrastructure readiness, retention systems, platform fit — are largely category-agnostic. The specific numbers will differ, but the diagnostic approach transfers.
How do I know if this problem applies to my store?
The fastest way is a direct diagnostic of your own store, tracking, and infrastructure — we can tell you within a week whether the same pattern shows up.
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