Storks had dominated Turkish jewellery export since 1995 without needing digital. I built two separate platforms: a consumer storefront, and a gated vendor community where wholesale buyers place orders and see launches first.
A company that had won offline for nearly thirty years and had almost no digital presence. The brief was not to invent a brand, it was to carry an established one into a channel it had never used, without cheapening it.
The harder problem was that two audiences with opposite needs were being asked to share one site. A distributor placing a volume order and a consumer buying one ring want different pricing, different catalogues, different proof and different checkout. Serving both from a single storefront serves neither, and showing wholesale pricing publicly damages the retail brand.
Two working channels where there had been none: a consumer storefront that grew traffic 300% at 20% better conversion, and a gated wholesale platform that became the way trade buyers hear about launches and place orders.
Splitting the two audiences onto two platforms was the decision that made everything else work. Once wholesale had its own gated space, the consumer site could be optimised purely for consumers, and the trade relationship stopped being a mailing list and became a place buyers log into. A vendor community is a retention channel that happens to take orders.
I built a gated B2B community platform for trade buyers in 2022. In 2024 I joined Bettermode to market community platform software to B2B SaaS companies. I had been the customer before I was the marketer, which is why the ICP work there moved as fast as it did.