How Estrid accelerated growth by switching from Chargebee to Shopify
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Estrid, the fast-growing self-care brand known for its inclusive approach and bold brand voice, had outgrown its subscription-only setup. With ambitions to scale both product offerings and operations, the team decided it was time to upgrade their tech stack. This meant replacing Chargebee with Shopify and rethinking how logistics, accounting, and integrations were handled.
We spoke to the team at Estrid to hear how the migration unfolded, what role Prime Penguin played, and how it all worked behind the scenes.
In this article:
Background:
Estrid had initially relied on Chargebee for managing subscriptions, but as their product lines expanded and customer journeys evolved, the platform’s limitations became apparent. The brand needed a more flexible commerce engine that could seamlessly support both one-time purchases and subscriptions, alongside richer product catalogs, built-in marketing tools, and advanced analytics. Shopify emerged as the ideal fit for this new phase of growth.
Shopify provided the end-to-end flexibility needed to streamline operations and prepare for scalable growth. Estrid approached the migration as a high-intensity, cross-functional sprint.
This involved migrating customer and order data, revamping product listings, reconfiguring connected applications, and rebuilding key operational infrastructure. It was a demanding process, but collaboration across teams made it both fast and rewarding.
Challenge:
The migration to Shopify necessitated a complete overhaul of Estrid’s existing infrastructure, impacting sales channels, accounting logic, and critical warehouse connections.
With a lean product team, efficiency and speed were paramount. The most significant bottleneck identified was the integration with their complex Warehouse Management Systems (WMS), which typically required months of custom development. Estrid needed a solution that could bypass this extensive development time and allow their team to focus on customer-facing improvements.
Solution:
Estrid partnered with Prime Penguin to navigate the intricacies of their warehouse integrations without the need for extensive custom development. Prime Penguin acted as the central orchestration layer, enabling Estrid to seamlessly connect Shopify and other essential tools directly to their diverse warehouse systems—even those running on legacy EDI infrastructure.
According to the Estrid team, Prime Penguin handled the heavy lifting around WMS integrations, significantly reducing the expected development timeline. What would have taken months of custom work was instead achieved in a matter of days, freeing Estrid’s product team to focus on enhancing the user experience and optimizing performance, rather than dealing with backend complexity.
The migration wasn’t merely about replicating existing workflows; it was an opportunity to optimize them. Estrid prioritized core functionalities first, then iteratively enhanced them.
Prime Penguin’s inherent flexibility allowed Estrid to roll out changes and implement new operational logic instantly, without the need for custom code. This accelerated improvements and surfaced efficiencies Estrid hadn’t anticipated.
Result:
Today, Prime Penguin serves as Estrid’s operational backbone. It centrally routes all B2B and DTC orders from Shopify (and other channels) into multiple warehouses, provides real-time visibility on inbound/outbound movements and inventory levels, and offers the added capability to tweak processes in minutes through custom logics built specifically for Estrid.
As Estrid continues its rapid growth, they are layering in deeper automations and experiment-driven optimizations to enhance the customer experience continually. Prime Penguin’s ability to adapt to new operational logic in real time means Estrid can test and deploy feature changes instantly, without backend bottlenecks.
Estrid emphasized how critical this level of agility has been, noting that being able to deploy operational changes instantly ensures Estrid stays responsive across markets. That degree of control has been essential for their fast-paced growth.
Would They Recommend It?
Absolutely. According to Estrid, in e-commerce, the speed of iteration is crucial: you need to launch, learn, and pivot rapidly. That level of agility requires a supply-chain backbone that can mirror operational changes in real time. Shopify gave them the flexibility and scalability to move fast on the front end, while Prime Penguin ensured backend operations could keep up without friction.
Estrid strongly recommends this combination to other brands in a similar stage, emphasizing that the synergy between Shopify’s frontend flexibility and Prime Penguin’s backend stability is key to achieving sustainable, agile growth.
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