Linen House & Aura Home

B2B, POS and online unified: a complex architecture, simplified

Shopify B2B Solutions,
Shopify POS Implementation,
Shopify Migration

Websites

Australian retail is at an inflection point. After decades of building complex, disparate technology stacks to fit the "unique" needs of every business, the smartest operators are realising simplification is the strategic move — not the compromise. The mindset has shifted. The action, until recently, hadn't. Then two of Australia's most established homewares brands quietly did what most retailers at their scale are still talking about.

Linen House and Aura Home — 28 retail stores between them, decades of trading history, active wholesale operations supplying most of the country's major retailers, and customer relationships that run generations deep — have moved together onto a single Shopify environment, unifying online, retail POS, and B2B wholesale in one project. Within months of launch, Linen House’s conversion rose 70%, while Aura Home’s session conversion lifted 240%. In a category where unification usually means adding another integration, this is a different kind of build.

The thinking matched the execution. Sharing back-office operations across warehouse, customer service, and IT, the two brands used the migration to redesign the commerce architecture itself: Shopify as the customer-facing source of truth across every channel, NetSuite on the operational end for inventory, finance, and wholesale business rules. Delivered by The Working Party without the timeline, headless complexity, or seven-figure budget of an enterprise transformation program, the project positions both brands for the next chapter of growth on infrastructure that finally matches the ambition.

Rebuilding the systems architecture, not just the website

The strategic case for the migration was never a platform swap. It was an architectural redesign. NetSuite, already established as the operational backbone in an earlier phase of the transformation, would continue managing the business rules a decades-old wholesale operation depends on: parent-child account structures, contract pricing, geographic exclusivity, multi-tiered pricing across hundreds of accounts. Shopify would take on everything the customer touched. Two systems, each doing what it does best, tightly integrated via Celigo.

The technical dividend was substantial. The preview platform’s platform-as-a-service model had loaded the internal team with responsibility for the full stack beneath the site, including security patching, infrastructure upgrades, and deployment discipline before every release. Every small change carried weeks of scaffolding. Shopify's SaaS environment removed that layer entirely. The Linen House site shifted from Google's 'poor' to 'good' Core Web Vitals band within days of launch — the kind of baseline improvement that comes almost by default when platform maintenance stops being a shared burden.

Migrating retail POS and B2B Companies in the same project as the D2C rebuild wasn't the standard option, but it was the sensible one. Sequencing would have meant integrating Shopify to the legacy POS only to rip it out and integrate Shopify POS six months later. Two versions of the same work, and the unified commerce case deferred until whichever channel came last was finally on the platform. Doing all three at once was harder in the moment, but it was the only version of the project that actually made architectural sense.

When shared systems stop being a compromise

Linen House and Aura Home occupy different corners of the Australian homewares market — different customers, different price positioning, different rhythms of collection and campaign. Sharing infrastructure isn't new for the two brands. Warehouse, customer service, back-office operations, and the previous eCommerce platform, have all been shared for years. What's changed is that the shared foundation now works in both brands' favour rather than at either's expense.

The technical work behind that shift matters. A single Horizon-based codebase carries both brands, with each brand's identity layered through the design system — separate Figma files, distinct visual languages, independent content workflows managed by each team. Nothing about the shared architecture asks either brand to soften how it shows up in the market. Customers experience two fully independent brands, because that's what they are. Aura Home’s average session engagement time has lifted 292% since launch — a signal that the shared architecture is serving its distinct brand expression in a way that its specific customers love.

The commercial payoff is felt across the day-to-day. On the old stack, shared infrastructure meant shared bottlenecks: every change queued behind the same limited pool of development capacity, and marketing work waited while security patches and platform upgrades cleared the pipeline. Both brands felt the same drag, and neither could move faster than the constraint. The new foundation reverses that logic. Apps and integrations become viable at costs neither brand could justify alone. Improvements identified by one team are adopted by the other without duplicated scoping. Cross-team problem-solving — helped along by the fact both teams share a studio floor — now compounds rather than competes. The shared foundation didn't become valuable when it started existing. It became valuable when it started working.

One customer, one multichannel journey

The strategic argument for unified commerce is easy to make in the abstract. The proof lives in what becomes visible once the systems underneath are actually connected, starting with the customer herself.

For years, a shopper who bought sheets at the Aura Home's Hawksburn store and returned to the site three months later to finish a bedroom set was, to the business, two people. Two records, two purchase histories, two fragmented views of a relationship that had already deepened. On the new architecture, she is one customer, with a lifetime value that finally reflects what she actually means to Aura Home. Every downstream outcome unified commerce is supposed to deliver — the automated review email that now reaches her after her in-store purchase, the gift card she buys online and redeems at the counter, the personalisation that recognises her across channels — is a consequence of that single shift. At Linen House, the reviews program alone has gone from 93 submissions a month to 228, driven almost entirely by in-store customers finally being seen by it.

The wholesale side moves on the same logic. Customer data flows automatically from NetSuite into Shopify Companies via Celigo, carrying account structures, pricing tiers, and contract terms without the manual reconciliation that had taxed the team for years. And across all 28 retail stores, staff moved onto Shopify POS with a training curve quieter than anyone had expected — the operational proof that the architecture is doing what it was built to do. None of this was possible while the systems underneath were still pretending to be connected. Now they actually are.

Conversion up 70% at Linen House. Session conversion up 240% at Aura Home. Both within months of launch — proof that the architecture is doing what it was built to do.

The goal was to simplify. We had reached the point where the operational overhead of running our own infrastructure was slowing down every part of the business — from marketing execution to opening new stores. Bringing our customer-facing systems together on Shopify, sitting alongside NetSuite as our operational source of truth, has removed that friction. Simple is good, complex is bad — and this project moved us decisively toward the simpler end. The Working Party understood what we needed to build, and just as importantly, what we didn't.

Tez Osman

CIO, Linen House

Services

Technology and Performance