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Most legacy commerce platforms treat wholesale and direct-to-consumer (DTC) as two different businesses. Two systems, two inventories, two customer databases, and often a multi-month, high-budget project just to stand up a business-to-business (B2B) channel at all. For CPG brands running both, that split creates operational drag: manual reconciliation, inconsistent stock counts, and a wholesale buyer experience that feels bolted on rather than built in.

DTC & B2B on One Platform: What Native Shopify B2B Covers

We hosted a live user experience (UX) audit of Momofuku's mobile site, selected from 82 brands who submitted their sites. The review of the PDP for Momofuku's Chili Crunch became a practical lesson in what CPG product pages should have before peak season. Below, we break down their recommendations and how to apply them to your own PDPs.

The BFCM Product Detail Page Checklist

At Barrel, we've run a design internship program for more than a decade. It's a good window into how we actually operate day to day: how we mentor, how we collaborate across disciplines, and how new perspective moves into client work. This internship program is something we genuinely get excited about, and it says a lot about our culture.

What Our Design Internship Program Says About How Barrel Works

Shopify Canvas is a new AI-first workspace in the Shopify admin where merchants design or redesign their online store by chatting with Sidekick, Shopify's AI assistant, or by editing elements directly. Shopify announced Canvas on October 1st, 2026, and it's rolling out gradually in early access.

What Is Shopify Canvas & What Does It Mean for CPG Brands?

Why CPG Brands are Moving to Shopify (and What to Know Before You Do)

To support the launch on the ecommerce site, we created distinct landing pages showcasing Butterbeer, the Magical Flavors, and the overall 25 Years of Magic campaign. We launched these pages through a phased approach, to prolong the storytelling of the collaboration. We started with a pre-launch page designed to build excitement and ended with the post-launch page with the full campaign that evolves over time, including the recent back-to-Hogwarts™ season.

Translating McCormick's Harry Potter™ Collection Into an Immersive Shop Experience

Email and SMS are the foundation for the modern retention playbook. But for a lot of CPG brands, the returns on those channels have started to flatten. Inboxes are crowded, deliverability is inconsistent, and customers have trained themselves to scroll past anything that looks like marketing.That is why more CPG brands, especially in supplements, food and beverage, and beauty, are adding a channel that predates all of them: direct mail.

A Powerful (and Often Overlooked) Channel for CPG Retention: Direct Mail

How We Made Waterloo’s Non-DTC Site Feel Shoppable

Barrel’s Live Site Audit Ahead of BFCM

SMS is one of the most direct and highest-converting channels available to CPG brands during Black Friday/Cyber Monday BFCM. Many brands make the mistake of copying their email campaigns for SMS, treating it as a smaller version of email. But it’s actually a different channel that should be treated with different approaches.

Tips for Successful SMS Campaigns for BFCM

Here is what Barrel took away from K:BOS 2026, and what it means for CPG brands building their digital ecosystem on Shopify.

Insights from K:BOS 2026 for CPG Brands: AI, Agents, and the End of the Siloed Customer Journey

Your site is your digital flagship, and during Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM), mobile is where that flagship gets tested. A fast, friction-free experience is what separates a bounce from a conversion.

Make Your Mobile Site Holiday-Ready

Campaign Ideas That Cut Through BFCM Inbox Noise

Stop Batch-and-Blast: A Segmentation Framework for Holiday Email

Bundling is one of the highest-impact strategies available to CPG brands during Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM), and it's often underused. Last holiday season, brands using bundles saw average order value (AOV) increases of 20% to 30% or more. Bundling doesn't just grow cart size. It cuts through decision fatigue, making the path to purchase easier and more rewarding.

Make Bundling Your BFCM Advantage

As we wrote earlier this year, category leaders get a default advantage when AI assistants make recommendations, but that advantage still has to be earned with the right content. Cabot's ongoing retainer with Barrel gave us the opportunity to test that thesis directly.

How We Helped Cabot Creamery Build AI Authority in a Competitive Category

Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) inboxes are noisy. The brands that break through aren't the ones yelling louder; rather they're the ones that make each customer feel like the message was made specifically for them, even at scale. Here's how we've seen top CPG brands in food & beverage, beauty & skincare, healthy & wellness, and home, family, & pet leverage personalization across every major channel.

Personalization at Scale: Email, SMS, Push, and Onsite

A strong gift guide can solve that problem directly, turning a crowded catalog into a handful of clear, confident choices. Last Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) season, 73% of shoppers said they welcome inspiration from retailers when planning gift purchases.

Gift Guides for BFCM: Guiding Shoppers Through the Holiday Rush

Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) is a carefully timed rollout, and the brands that come out ahead are the ones that structure their marketing planning across the months leading up to the most important sales season of the year. Here's how we recommend breaking down the work, phase by phase.

Your BFCM Roadmap: What to Do in August, September, October, and November

What We Ask in Every UX Audit

Beyond the Discount: Building a BFCM Campaign That Reflects Your Brand Story

If you want subscribers who convert during Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM), the incentive to sign-up needs to be clear, exclusive, and tied to something tangible. Here are the acquisition tactics we see working for CPG brands right now.

Lead Magnets, Quizzes, and Gated Content: Smarter List Growth for CPG Brands

Why We're Auditing One CPG Site Live Before BFCM

Eighteen months ago, Sidekick was a new feature. At Shopify's DotDev conference, Shopify's Head of Partnerships, Atlee Clark, presented it as a platform in its own right, and the numbers behind it are worth sitting with: 32 million analytics reports generated, 25 million flows built, 3.4 million customer segments created, and 600K flow automations now running every single day.

What Shopify's Sidekick Data Tells Us About the Future of Ecommerce Operations

The Shopify Toolkit for AI-Ready CPG Stores

Mack Weldon built its business on modern menswear essentials, underwear, undershirts, and everyday basics engineered with proprietary fabrics for comfort and durability. That product mix brings two different shoppers to the same product listing page (PLP): loyal customers who already know what they want and are moving quickly to restock, and new customers who are still comparing colors, fabrics, and fits for the first time. Designing navigation, filtering, and product-browsing tools that work for both audiences at once became the focus of our conversion rate optimization (CRO) testing program on Mack Weldon's PLPs.

How Hiding Filters Helped Mack Weldon Lift Conversion Rate by 6.06%

The collections overhaul announced at Shopify's DotDev developer conference on July 21 is not an incremental platform update. Shopify's Head of Partnerships, Atlee Clark, called it the biggest update to collections in ten years, and for CPG brands managing complex product lines, that is not an exaggeration.

Shopify's Latest Collections Update: What It Means for CPG Catalogs

Most brands treat customer service and customer experience (CX) as a cost center: a queue to clear, a ticket count to reduce. Good Protein treats it as one of the most valuable data sources in the business, and that decision is now paying off in an unexpected place: AI search visibility.

Turning Your CX Team Into a Content Engine

Agentic Checkout Is Already Converting. Is Your Catalog Ready?

Elvie UK Migration to Shopify Plus