A homegrown footwear brand, built to compete with category giants.

One team, one ROAS-target discipline: storefront, creative production, paid acquisition, organic search and daily operations – all built and run by NullStack for Schick-a-Walk, a premium Indian women’s footwear D2C brand on Shopify.

VISIT THE STOREFRONT

E-commerce · Women’s premium footwear

Two-month build · Ongoing programme

End-to-end: build, marketing, ops

Shopify · Liquid · Razorpay · WATI

A full-stack D2C launch - not a website with marketing bolted on.

Schick-a-Walk is a homegrown Indian women’s footwear brand competing in a category dominated by Bata, Hush Puppies, Monrow and a long tail of marketplace-first sellers. The catalogue spans Slip-Ons, Flats, Heels, Loafers and Wedges, alongside signature comfort lines – HappiToes and Comfitoes – and occasion-led collections built for the way Indian women actually shop: Office Wear, All Day Comfort, Minimalist, Festive Ready.

The brief was the full-stack version of a D2C launch. Not a website project with marketing bolted on; not a paid-ads engagement with a storefront somewhere else. One mandate, one team: build the e-commerce platform, build the creative production engine to feed it, build the demand engine on top, build the operational backbone underneath, and build the long-term organic moat. Two months to launch. A sustained performance and content programme after. We delivered all of it.

A custom Shopify build that does not look like one.

Shopify was the right platform for a premium D2C brand at this stage – predictable hosting, PCI-compliant payments by default, a mature app ecosystem, and a theme layer flexible enough to express a premium brand without the overhead of a fully custom platform. We built a custom theme structure in Liquid rather than buying an off-the-shelf one, so the storefront looks like Schick-a-Walk and nothing else on the internet.

Catalogue architecture	Two parallel taxonomies – Shop by Category (Slip-Ons, Flats, Heels, Loafers, Wedges, HappiToes, Comfitoes) and Shop by Occasion (All Day Comfort, Minimalist, Office Wear, Festive Ready). Shoppers reach the right SKU in two clicks regardless of which mental model they bring.
Product page	Footwear is a high-consideration category. We engineered the PDP around the decision: consistent imagery angles, clear material and comfort descriptors, size guidance, occasion tagging, prominent return terms. Full schema.org Product, Offer and AggregateRating on every page so SKUs surface with rich snippets.
Razorpay payments	UPI, cards, net banking, wallets and EMI – surfaced in the order most likely to convert for the Indian market. Single tightly-instrumented checkout with abandoned-cart recovery wired in from day one. Failed-payment retries and order-status notifications run silently in the background.
WATI / WhatsApp commerce	India buys on WhatsApp. WATI integrated for order updates, customer support, abandoned-cart nudges, returns coordination and broadcast campaigns. The integration is two-way — every conversation lives alongside the customer record. Support works from full context, not fragments.
Logistics aggregator	Multi-courier fulfilment, real-time tracking, RTO management and reverse pickups end-to-end without manual data shuffling. Customers see live tracking on their order page and on WhatsApp; ops works from one dashboard rather than juggling courier portals.
Performance	Green Core Web Vitals across the storefront. Compressed and lazy-loaded imagery, deferred non-critical scripts, third-party tags on a controlled loader. The result feels fast on mid-tier mobile devices — which, as the data later confirmed, is where ~84% of the audience actually shops.
Trust signals	Verified-purchase reviews on every PDP. Trust badges at checkout. Returns and exchange policies linked from every product page — not buried in the footer. For a young brand fighting category incumbents, on-site trust is the conversion lever.

Meta and Google, under one ROAS discipline.

Performance marketing is where the brand gets discovered, qualified and converted. We own the entire paid stack — strategy, account architecture, creative pipeline, audience design, bidding logic, day-to-day optimisation and daily reporting.

Meta Ads — Facebook & Instagram

Ad account setup, pixel implementation, catalogue feed, Conversions API integration, audience architecture and campaign management — all in-house. The Meta account runs on a simplified, scalable framework evolved through extensive testing:

Two broad video-led prospecting campaigns, segmented by hero product line — a HappiToes campaign and a Chloe campaign — targeting women 18–45 with no interest stacking. Broad targeting plus strong creative does the heavy lifting; the algorithm does the rest.
One bottom-of-funnel catalogue retargeting campaign that closes the loop on warm traffic with dynamic product ads pulled directly from the Shopify catalogue feed.
Strict operational discipline — seven-day no-change windows after structural edits (the algorithm needs that long to learn), budget increments capped at ~20% every three days to protect CPA stability while scaling.
Indian D2C purchase patterns respected — evening purchases peak in this category, so daily performance is read after 10:30pm IST rather than mid-day, when intra-day numbers misrepresent reality.

The HappiToes line has anchored as a reliable performer on this structure, sustaining a Meta-reported ROAS in the 4–5x range, with bottom-of-funnel retargeting converting the warm pool the prospecting campaigns build.

Google Ads — Search, Shopping, YouTube

A multi-property Google account managed end-to-end:

Google Shopping via Merchant Center, with product feed health monitoring, image optimisation and category mapping that lets every SKU compete on the SERP for high-intent queries.
Google Search campaigns covering brand defence (protecting “schick a walk” and “schickawalk” from competitor bids) and high-commercial-intent non-brand terms.
YouTube Ads running the same product-video assets produced for Meta and social, repurposed for in-stream and shorts placements to extend creative ROI.
Conversion tracking wired through GA4 and Google Ads conversions, with enhanced conversions for higher-fidelity attribution

Two brand variations, both holding position 1 on Google with a ~71–75% click-through rate. That is not luck — that is the cumulative result of paid social, paid search, content production and PR-grade brand consistency driving people back to Google to search the brand name. Brand-SERP defence is the highest-margin organic real estate any D2C brand can own, and Schick-a-Walk owns it.

Mobile dominance (84% of clicks) validates the Core Web Vitals investment from day one. The 99% India concentration confirms targeting discipline — paid spend is not leaking to irrelevant geographies. The category-level opportunity surface is also visible: queries like “half shoes for women” (78 impressions) and “half cut shoes for ladies” (46 impressions) are already indexing — the next phase of the SEO programme is converting those impressions into clicks.

The unglamorous layer that makes everything work.

Before any of the above shipped, and continuously since, we run:

Competitor research — pricing, range, positioning, paid-creative monitoring and on-site experience audits across category incumbents and direct D2C competitors. Meta Ad Library is a daily-read tool, not a quarterly one.
Market research — Indian women’s footwear category sizing, channel preferences, price elasticity, occasion-led demand patterns, regional purchase behaviour.
Audience research — first-party data from the Shopify customer base, social audience insights, paid-platform audience profiling, customer-service conversation analysis.

This is the layer that makes the creative briefs sharper, the audience targeting tighter and the offer architecture smarter. It is the difference between running ads and running a brand.