Charm Distributors - Case study

Overview

Charm Distributors is a Moscow-based distributor of professional hair and beauty brands for salons, professional shops and independent stylists, founded in 2003. Its portfolio includes Keratin Complex, Macadamia Professional, L'Alga, Bosley MD and RevitaLash Cosmetics, and it offers training and marketing support to the businesses it supplies.

Our engagement ran in 2016 and 2017, and in those years charmdis.ru was a WordPress site: a page for each brand in the portfolio - Living proof, Keratin Complex, Macadamia Professional, Bosley, Eslabondexx, Footlogix, RevitaLash, H.AirSPA, Earthen, Celeb Luxury, L'Alga, AntidotPro and the rest - alongside the company pages, news, articles, a training section and a Become a partner path.

The wholesale logic sat in the forms. The price-list request asks the visitor to say who they are - a salon, a professional shop, an online store or an independent stylist - because a distributor prices those four differently, and the submission carries the referring page with it, so it is clear which brand page produced the lead. Around that: Contact Form 7 with captcha for the enquiry and callback forms, front-end submissions for partner material, access control for the parts meant for partners rather than the public, quizzes in the training section, and newsletters going out from the site itself.

The build was a custom theme on the Codestar options framework over WordPress 4.5 and later 4.9, with a gallery plugin for the brand and event photography, Shortcodes Ultimate for the marketing pages, Jetpack, and minification in front of it all, behind nginx.

The archive records what came after: the site was still WordPress on 11 July 2022, and by 6 September 2022 it was a 1C-Bitrix build - the one live today, credited in its own footer to another studio. That current site keeps the same shape: a catalogue organised by care category and by brand, news, partners, a blog and vacancies, a price-list request form that asks whether the buyer is a salon, a pro shop, an online store, a stylist or a private customer, and a callback form. Retail orders go to the separate online store shop-charmdis.ru, also on 1C-Bitrix, with catalogue filters, a wishlist, an outlet section and promotions.

What was built

A page per brand in the distributor's portfolio, each one a landing for the salons and stylists who buy it.

A price-list request segmented by buyer type - salon, professional shop, online store, independent stylist - so an enquiry arrives already qualified.

Referrer capture on the enquiry forms, so a lead carries the brand page it came from.

Callback requests and contact forms with captcha and consent to personal data processing.

A Become a partner path, with front-end submissions and access control for material meant for partners rather than the public.

A training section with quizzes, plus news, articles and publications.

Newsletters sent from the site, with subscriber management in place.

A custom WordPress theme on the Codestar options framework, with galleries, shortcode-built marketing pages and asset minification behind nginx.

Stack

CMS & Commerce

WordPress: The platform through the whole engagement, 4.5 in 2016 and 4.9 by 2018
Custom uoc-theme + Codestar framework: Site-specific theme with a settings framework behind it
1C-Bitrix: What the company moved to in the autumn of 2022, after this engagement, in a build by another studio

Forms & Marketing

Contact Form 7 + captcha: Price-list requests, callbacks and enquiries, with a referrer field carrying the source page
WP User Frontend: Submissions from the site itself rather than from the admin
User Access Manager: Partner-only material kept out of public view
WP-Pro-Quiz: Quizzes in the training section
MailPoet (Wysija): Newsletters and subscriber lists run from the site

Frontend

Gallery Master: Brand and event photography
Shortcodes Ultimate: Marketing page layouts without touching templates
Simple Lightbox, Jetpack: Image viewing and site utilities

Infrastructure & DevOps

nginx: In front of the site then and now
BWP Minify: Asset minification on the WordPress build

Engineering highlights

The form is the product for a distributor: asking whether the visitor is a salon, a pro shop, an online store or a stylist sorts the lead before a human reads it, and the captured referrer says which brand pulled them in.

Brand pages do double duty - they serve the manufacturer's marketing and act as the landing pages a distributor's own campaigns point at.

The build long outlived the engagement: the WordPress site kept running until the autumn of 2022, five years after the work ended, when the company moved to a 1C-Bitrix build by another studio.