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 it sold exclusively through natural healthcare practitioners, so it reached only the people who visit one. A 7-year-old legacy website couldn't carry a shift to direct-to-consumer.

The board set a target: grow D2C from 1% to 20% of ANZ revenue by the end of 2025. Project Olympia was the initiative built to hit it.

Stand up a new D2C channel for a regulated supplements brand in 6 months, and keep the 40-year B2B practitioner business, still generating 99% of revenue, running undisturbed.

The program ran six parallel workstreams: D2C Technology, Range & Labels, D2C Marketing, B2B Communications, Internal Communications, and Commercial. It included a Shopify Plus re-platform with 280+ regulated product label artworks needing a TGA-compliant transition before go-live, and a Steering Committee that needed to know the aggressive timeline was defensible.

Metagenics brought us 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 set four design principles for the program:

• Low-code first: ~90% out-of-the-box Shopify. Less custom code meant smaller scope, faster delivery, and less testing.
• Explicit fallback strategy: Sitecore milestones stayed as a backup in case the Shopify proof-of-concept failed. We set pivot criteria upfront.
• Go/no-go checkpoints: Formal decision gates at each phase, launch included.
• Transparent risk register: We named schedule risks from day one, so 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. The Steering Committee met fortnightly at first, then monthly as confidence grew. We calibrated the rhythm to the decision-making tempo the program needed.

The labels problem

The hardest delivery problem was 280+ regulated product label artworks that needed to transition to the MasterBrand identity before go-live. All were subject to TGA compliance, production lead times varied by product line, and existing stock 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 knowledge 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 3 October, 47 labels had been approved to print and two MasterBrand products were already in market, with 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.

We kept the UAT issues out of the escalation 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. We raised the US conflict with the Steering Committee immediately, adjusted the testing approach, and kept the program on track. It took a governance structure that knew how to absorb a hit and keep moving.

Project Olympia launched on time on 3 October 2024, 6 months from kickoff, on budget and with zero 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, which shows the B2B channel, built alongside D2C, is pulling its weight.

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. We 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.