How Metagenics Launched D2C in 6 Months — On Time, On Budget

Metagenics is a 40-year-old natural healthcare and supplements brand. For four decades, the company sold exclusively through natural healthcare practitioners — but only 4% of Australians visit one. A 7-year-old legacy website couldn't support a shift to direct-to-consumer.

The board had approved a target: grow D2C from 1% to 20% of ANZ revenue by end 2025. Project Olympia was the initiative to make it possible.

Stand up a brand-new D2C channel for a regulated supplements brand in 6 months — without disrupting the 40-year B2B practitioner business that still represented 99% of revenue.

Six parallel workstreams: D2C Technology, Range & Labels, D2C Marketing, B2B Communications, Internal Communications, and Commercial. A Shopify Plus re-platform with 280+ regulated product label artworks needing TGA-compliant transition before go-live. A Steering Committee that needed to know aggressive timelines were defensible.

Softwired was brought in as client-side project management lead. The remit was governance, delivery structure, and the agile ways of working that would hold a 6-workstream program together under a 6-month deadline.

Set the principles before writing a line of code

Before any planning, we established four design principles the program would live by:

• Low-code first: ~90% out-of-the-box Shopify. Less custom code meant smaller scope, faster delivery, and a significantly reduced testing burden.
• Explicit fallback strategy: Sitecore milestones were maintained as a backup if the Shopify proof-of-concept failed. Pivot criteria were defined upfront.
• Go/No-Go checkpoints: Formal decision gates at each phase. No drift into launch.
• Transparent risk register: Schedule risks were named from day one. The Steering Committee was never surprised.

Six workstreams, one delivery rhythm

Stream Lead stand-ups ran twice weekly. Sprint planning, retrospectives, and product showcases ran fortnightly. Steering Committee started fortnightly and transitioned to monthly as confidence grew. The rhythm was calibrated to the decision-making tempo the program actually needed.

The labels problem

The most complex delivery challenge wasn't the technology — it was 280+ regulated product label artworks that needed to transition to the MasterBrand identity before go-live, all subject to TGA compliance, with production lead times varying by product line and existing stock that couldn't be written off at scale.

We ran cross-functional workshops to surface tacit knowledge from Production, Commercial, and Supply Chain leads — the kind of expertise that never makes it into a project brief. From there, we built a sequencing model that balanced stock positions, production schedules, and go-live criticality. By Go-Live on October 3, 47 labels had been approved to print and two MasterBrand products were already in market — the rest tracking against the sequencing model on schedule.

When things went sideways

Four weeks from launch, UAT surfaced quality issues. At the same time, the ERP team was called to the US mid-testing. These are the moments that separate delivered programs from delayed ones.

We didn't escalate the UAT issues up the chain — we brought the front-end developers and the ERP team into the same room and ran all-day working sessions until the issues were resolved. The US conflict was raised to the Steering Committee immediately, the testing approach adjusted, and the program stayed on track. No heroics. A governance structure that knew how to absorb a hit and keep moving.

Project Olympia launched on time on October 3, 2024 — six months from kickoff, on budget, with no cost variation. All 280+ product labels transitioned without a single stock-out and with minimal write-offs.

At launch, 24% of consumers and patients opted into D2C subscriptions on day one. The 'Find a Practitioner' page is now the third most-visited page on the new site — confirming the B2B channel, built alongside D2C, is pulling its weight.

Just as importantly, the in-house Digital team is now self-sufficient. Throughout delivery, we ran the team as a squad — establishing the ceremonies, cadences, and ways of working they'd carry forward. Softwired handed off gradually: James stepped back from running meetings, coached the incoming Product Manager hands-on, then exited. The squad continues to iterate today using the practices built during the program. The outcome that matters isn't a handover document — it's a team that doesn't need us anymore.