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We’ve been using Appbrew for close to two months now, and the experience so far has been really positive. The app runs reliably, and the Appbrew team has been responsive and helpful whenever we’ve had questions, typically getting back to us within a few hours. As we continue to grow, we’re starting to focus more on gaining deeper insights into our customers. Overall, it’s been a solid experience, and we’d definitely recommend Appbrew to brands looking for a streamlined way to build and manage their app. Definitely one of the best Shopify app builders around.
About Standard Beauty
Standard Beauty is a South African skincare brand focused on making effective skincare more accessible, educational, and community-driven. As the brand scaled, mobile increasingly became the primary way customers discovered products, consumed content, and engaged with the brand.
But despite investing in mobile early, the team never felt their previous app truly reflected the Standard Beauty experience. Their app on Tapcart functioned more like a compressed version of the website than a true mobile-first channel. The experience felt cluttered, difficult to update, and lacked the clean, premium aesthetic the brand wanted customers to associate with Standard Beauty.
At the same time, the team was leaning heavily into educational skincare content, creator videos, loyalty, and personalized discovery. They needed an app that could support content-rich commerce while giving them more control over campaigns, merchandising, and customer engagement in real time.
Most importantly, they saw the app becoming a central part of their long-term growth strategy, not just another storefront.
To make that vision possible, Standard Beauty moved from Tapcart to Appbrew.
The Challenge: Moving Beyond a Website-Like App to Build a Premium Mobile Experience
As Standard Beauty grew, the limitations of their previous mobile setup became harder to ignore. The app lacked the flexibility, speed, and native experience required to support a modern skincare brand built around content, education, and repeat engagement.
A cluttered app experience that did not feel mobile-first
The previous app felt more like a direct website port than a thoughtfully designed mobile experience. Navigation felt crowded, layouts lacked hierarchy, and the overall journey did not reflect the clean, premium aesthetic the brand wanted customers to experience.
Limited control over campaigns and merchandising
The team lacked a robust CMS that allowed them to update banners, collections, homepage layouts, and promotional sections in real time. This slowed down campaign execution and made it difficult to keep the app dynamic and fresh.
Weak support for content-led commerce
Video content, skincare education, tutorials, and before-and-after journeys were becoming increasingly important to how customers discovered products. However, the previous setup made it difficult to surface this content natively throughout the app experience.
Localization and currency inconsistencies
A major friction point came from inconsistent handling of South African Rand pricing across parts of the app journey. For a primarily South African customer base, this created confusion and weakened trust during purchase flows.
A tight migration timeline
With their Tapcart contract ending on February 28, 2026, the team needed a partner that could rebuild and launch a significantly better app experience quickly, without disrupting the business.
The Solution: Building a Content-First, High-Performance App Designed Around Discovery and Loyalty
Appbrew partnered with Standard Beauty to create an app experience that felt cleaner, faster, and far more aligned with how modern skincare brands drive engagement and retention.
The focus was not just improving design. It was building a mobile ecosystem where content, loyalty, personalization, and commerce could work together seamlessly.
A cleaner and more premium mobile experience
Appbrew rebuilt the app with a cleaner visual structure, simplified navigation, and a more modern layout inspired by leading content-first commerce experiences like Sukoshi Mart. The result was an app that finally felt native to mobile rather than a compressed website experience.
Native reels and content-led discovery
Appbrew introduced a dedicated Discover section within the bottom navigation, allowing customers to browse skincare reels, tutorials, and product videos directly inside the app. This transformed content from a secondary marketing asset into a core part of the shopping journey.
Smarter PDPs built for trust and conversion
Appbrew redesigned Standard Beauty’s product pages to make product discovery more educational, engaging, and conversion focused. PDPs featured before and after sliders, detailed ingredient breakdowns, FAQs, usage guidance, reviews, and complementary product recommendations to help customers make more confident purchase decisions while increasing cross sell opportunities.
Personalized skincare journeys through the Skin Analyzer
Appbrew helped Standard Beauty surface its Skin Analyzer experience prominently across the app, including the homepage, collections, and account sections.
Instead of hiding the quiz deep within navigation, the feature became a central part of the customer journey, helping users discover products tailored to their skin concerns.
Loyalty and rewards built directly into the app
Appbrew helped Standard Beauty bring its “Passport” loyalty program to life through a fully integrated in app rewards experience. Customers could easily track points, unlock perks, redeem rewards, and engage with tier based benefits directly inside the app.
Alongside this, Appbrew configured Standard Beauty’s tiered free gift strategy directly through the CMS, ensuring multiple reward tiers stacked seamlessly based on cart value. This gave the brand greater flexibility to drive higher AOV while creating a smoother and more rewarding customer journey.
The Results: Turning Mobile Into a Major Revenue and Retention Channel
Once Standard Beauty launched on Appbrew, the impact across engagement, conversion, and revenue became immediately visible.
44% higher conversion rates on app
The app converted significantly better than the website as cleaner navigation, faster discovery, native content experiences, and simplified purchase flows reduced friction across the customer journey.
50% higher average order value
Customers spent substantially more on app compared to web, driven by stronger merchandising, educational product discovery, tiered gifting strategies, and more immersive browsing experiences.
34% of total DTC revenue driven through the app
The app quickly became one of Standard Beauty’s most meaningful growth channels, contributing more than a third of total DTC revenue.
What started as an underwhelming mobile presence evolved into a high-intent channel customers actively returned to for content, loyalty, discovery, and shopping.
Why Standard Beauty Chose Appbrew
Standard Beauty needed more than a standard ecommerce app. They needed a platform that could support modern skincare commerce where content, community, education, and loyalty all shape the customer journey.
Appbrew helped them achieve this by providing:
- A cleaner, more premium app experience aligned with the brand aesthetic
- Native video and reels integrated directly into the shopping journey
- A flexible CMS that gave the team real-time control over campaigns and merchandising
- Personalized experiences like the Skin Analyzer surfaced throughout the app
- Localized checkout and currency support built specifically for South African customers
- A scalable mobile foundation capable of driving meaningful long-term revenue growth
Standard Beauty’s journey reflects a larger shift happening across beauty and skincare brands today: customers increasingly expect mobile experiences that feel immersive, personalized, and content driven rather than transactional.
Brands that successfully combine commerce, education, video, and loyalty inside a seamless app experience are building stronger retention, higher purchase intent, and deeper customer engagement.
If your brand is ready to turn mobile into a high-performance growth channel, Appbrew is ready to build it with you.
