Scaling a Mission-Driven Ecommerce Marketplace from the Ground Up
Client: Made Trade
Industry: Retail, Marketplace
Timeline: 2018 - 2025
Results: 200+ sustainable brands, seven figure annual revenueOverview
Before Complete Breakfast, there was Made Trade. Founded by Cayley Pater and Andy Ives in 2018, Made Trade was a curated marketplace for ethically sourced, sustainably made home goods and furniture that redefined the sustainable home vertical.
Made Trade was a home for more than 200 verified ethical and sustainable brands and curated $200M+ in available inventory of responsibly-made home goods and furniture.
Complete Breakfast’s founders built this category-defining platform to prove that sustainability and commerce could work hand in hand to improve our world.
Every product on Made Trade was required to meet rigorous sustainability and ethical sourcing standards and was expertly crafted with fair labor and responsibly sourced materials.
Scope
Custom website, marketplace backend, and operational shipping logistics
Branding, visual identity, style guide, product, and lifestyle photography
Custom automations and backend integrations to keep headcount low
Results
Created a category leader in the sustainable home decor space
$200M in available, managed inventory
200+ sustainable brands on the platform
Ratio of $2M revenue to one customer service representative
Annual seven-figure revenue
A Category-Defining Marketplace
Made Trade was the definition of sustainable shopping, offering customers the largest curated collection of ethically made goods on the internet.
Key milestones
Created an exceptional end-to-end shopping experience for tens of thousands of customers
Built a flexible platform supporting thousands of products and SKUs
Growth driven by SEO, owned channels, and a robust affiliate network built in-house
Automation-First, Built to Scale
Made Trade wasn’t just a marketplace; it was a fully automated, high-efficiency commerce engine.
We architected a complex, API-driven tech stack that seamlessly connected over 30 best-in-class services, including Shopify Plus, Onport, Klaviyo, Gorgias, and Rebuy, to power our category-defining dropship marketplace.
With automation at its core, we scaled operations efficiently, supporting every $2M in revenue with just one customer support team member.
Our agile, sprint-based approach enabled rapid iteration, optimizing everything from search (Searchtap, Boost AI) to retention (Rise.ai, Yotpo) and logistics (Loop, Intuitive Shipping).
The result was an infrastructure capable of powering any dropship business at scale.
Designs Built to Convert
Great design isn’t about perfection; it’s about understanding the customer’s needs. We took a data-driven, user-first approach to UX and UI, continuously improving the site through A/B testing, heat mapping, direct customer feedback, and user testing.
Every sprint, we tested real user behavior, identified friction points, and made iterative improvements that enhanced navigation, streamlined checkout, and increased conversions.
With a small, agile team, we focused on high-impact changes that ensured both first-time visitors and returning customers had a seamless, intuitive experience.
By prioritizing customer insights over assumptions, we built a marketplace that wasn’t just functional but truly user-first.
True Omnichannel Growth Marketing
Scaling Made Trade wasn’t just about having great products; it was about reaching the right customers at the right time.
We built an omnichannel marketing strategy spanning paid social, organic content, email and SMS, SEO, and strategic partnerships, ensuring we engaged customers at every touchpoint.
Through data-driven A/B testing and audience segmentation, we optimized ad performance, increased conversion rates, and efficiently grew brand awareness.
Whether through high-performing Meta ads, automated Klaviyo email flows, or organic SEO rich content creation, our team maximized impact across channels, proving that with the right strategy, sustainable growth is scalable.
The Sustainable
Home Style Quiz
In 2024, we launched Made Trade’s Sustainable Home Style Quiz to better understand our customers’ aesthetic and style preferences.
This interactive tool allowed us to deliver personalized, sustainable product recommendations tailored to each shopper’s style, enhancing the customer experience and driving engagement across our marketing channels.
By leveraging insights from the quiz responses, we refined our email, ad, and on-site personalization strategies, making sustainable shopping both seamless and inspiring.
Photography that Rivaled the Biggest Brands
We couldn't afford the big-budget photo shoots of our competitors, so in 2019, we built our own in-house photo studio to capture high-quality lifestyle imagery for Made Trade’s brand, website, and seasonal marketing campaigns.
We consistently created visually compelling content that showcased the craftsmanship, materials, and stories behind every product.
By creating a visual style guide for photography and fine-tuning our on-set creative production, we maintained a strong, cohesive visual brand identity for Made Trade and proved that great imagery doesn’t require massive, bloated budgets, just the right vision and laser-focused execution.