Direct-to-consumer storefront + founder-led go-to-market
A scalp-first haircare brand got its own storefront and a founder-led go-to-market plan — with every product claim checked against what the business can actually prove.
The engagement
SilkMe by Karolina is a scalp oil created by Karolina Orzechowski, a South Florida hairstylist who built the product behind her own chair. The engagement had two halves: an independent storefront on the brand's own domain with its own checkout, and a complete go-to-market strategy — a growth package that turns a stylist-founder's chair-side sales into a repeatable launch plan.
01
The approved design arrived carrying marketing claims that had never been checked against the business — results percentages, a customer counter, a star rating and a shipping offer that existed nowhere in the company's actual policies. For a cosmetic product sold direct, publishing those unverified would have been a real liability, not a rounding error.
02
Every factual claim on the site was traced to a source the business could stand behind, and anything unsourceable was removed rather than softened. The removals were then locked in with a build check that fails if any of them reappear — including the stronger efficacy wording carried by the previous store. Checkout was built against Stripe with the payment page hosted by Stripe, so card data never touches the site. Alongside the storefront, the go-to-market package was built from the founder's own advantage outward: a warm-network-first launch (her existing clients and the Polish-speaking community the founders belong to) before any cold channel, a pricing framework anchored on the ~50% salon-margin benchmark rather than a guessed number, and a competitive positioning scan that located the brand's white space — scalp-first, salon channel, stylist-founder, local. Every partner-facing claim in the package carries the same FTC/claims governance the website does.
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The brand now has an independent storefront on its own domain, no longer dependent on a hosted store platform.
Fourteen unverified claims were removed before launch, and each surviving fact is traceable to a documented source.
The claims decision is enforced by the build rather than by memory — reintroducing a removed claim fails CI.
Checkout is complete and dormant by design: it activates when the client's payment credentials are added, with no code change.
The founder now has a complete, sourced go-to-market plan — launch sequence, pricing rationale, and competitive positioning — as a reviewable package rather than scattered advice.
Commercial terms are drafted as a concrete proposal (tiered, margin-based, no management fee) for the founder and her counsel to settle, not left as an open question.
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