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

Metagenics had a distribution problem disguised as a digital problem. Only 4% of Australians visit natural healthcare practitioners — the sole channel through which the brand had sold for 40 years. A 7-year-old legacy website couldn't support the shift to D2C. 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.

Softwired was brought in as client-side project management lead. Our remit: governance, delivery structure, and the agile ways of working that would hold together a 6-workstream program under a 6-month deadline. Here's how it played out.

Set the Principles Before Writing a Line of Code

The first thing we did wasn't plan sprints — it was establish design principles the whole program would live by. That decision paid dividends every time a scope conversation got difficult.

• 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 — not improvised mid-program.
• 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.

Clear-eyed principles meant the Steering Committee could approve aggressive timelines knowing exactly what trade-offs they were accepting. That's governance — not theatre.

Six Workstreams, One Delivery Rhythm

Olympia ran across six parallel workstreams: D2C Technology, Range & Labels, D2C Marketing, B2B Communications, Internal Communications, and Commercial. Coordinating that across internal teams, Overdose Digital (the Shopify implementation partner), and executive stakeholders required a cadence that kept everyone aligned without turning the program into a meeting factory.

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 wasn't arbitrary — it was calibrated to the decision-making tempo the program actually needed.

The Labels Problem Nobody Anticipated at the Start

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 requirements, with production lead times varying by product line and existing stock levels that couldn't be written off at scale.

The risk was real: sequence it wrong and you either go live with non-compliant labels, or you create stock-outs mid-transition. Either outcome damages the brand and the launch.

We ran cross-functional workshops to surface the tacit knowledge sitting in the heads of 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.

The result: by October 3, 47 labels had been approved to print and 2 MasterBrand products were already in market. All 280+ artworks transitioned on schedule. No stock-outs. Minimal write-offs.

When Things Went Sideways

Four weeks from launch, UAT surfaced quality issues. 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 — we brought the front-end developers and ERP team into the same room and ran all-day working sessions until the issues were resolved. The US conflict was escalated to the Steering Committee immediately, the testing approach was adjusted, and the program stayed on track. No heroics — just a governance structure that knew how to absorb a hit and keep moving.

The Numbers

• $522K USD — delivered on budget
• October 3, 2024 — launched on time
• 24% of consumers and patients opted into subscriptions at launch
• 'Find a Practitioner' is now the 3rd most-visited page on the site — the B2B channel, built alongside D2C, is pulling its weight
• E-commerce team is now fully self-sufficient — no IT dependency for platform changes

"I think the way we conquered scope creep was through the disciplined project management approach and the internal communications. We treated it as a business transformation, not just an e-commerce transformation. We created a business project, we assigned a project manager, we created streams... and we ran it through an agile framework."

— Suzie Young, Head of Digital ANZ, Metagenics

Exit Clean

The program didn't end at go-live. Throughout delivery, we had been running the Digital team as a squad — establishing the ceremonies, cadences, and ways of working they'd carry forward. The transition to BAU was gradual and deliberate: James stepped back from running meetings, provided hands-on coaching to the incoming Product Manager, and eventually exited entirely.

The squad continues to iterate on the platform today with the practices built during the program. That's the outcome that matters — not a handover document, but a team that doesn't need us anymore.