Cia Maritima
Brazil's number one luxury beachwear brand needed a digital flagship to enter the Singapore market. We built it, matched to the look and feel of their stores worldwide, and the same store is still trading today (now alongside a physical outlet at Tanglin Mall).
A customised Shopify store that brought Cia Maritima's brand to the Singapore market and is still its regional flagship years later.
The Challenge
What we were solving
Cia Maritima is the largest beachwear brand in Latin America. Founded in Brazil in 1990 and backed by the Rosset Group (South America's biggest Lycra fabric manufacturer), it designs and produces its own fabrics, prints and trims in-house and sells through more than 1,000 points of sale in Brazil alone.
In 2019 the brand was expanding internationally, with sites already live in Brazil and France and a US store in production. Singapore was next. The local team needed an online store that could carry a luxury fashion brand into a new market: photography-led, quick to shop, and unmistakably the same Cia Maritima a customer would find in Sao Paulo or Paris.
For a brand at this level, a template store was not an option, and neither was a six-month custom build. The store had to launch fast, look like a flagship, and be simple enough for a small local team to run day to day.
Success looked like a Singapore storefront that customers could not tell apart from the global brand, live and selling without a drawn-out build.
Our Approach
How we tackled it
The right platform, not the default one
Chillybin is a WordPress agency first, but the platform has to fit the job. For a fashion retailer entering a new market (a large catalogue, frequent collection drops, a small team, no appetite for server management), Shopify was the honest recommendation. It handles inventory, payments and checkout out of the box, which meant the budget went into brand presentation instead of plumbing.
We started from the Turbo theme by Out of the Sandbox, one of the fastest premium themes in the Shopify ecosystem, then customised it heavily so the finished store read as Cia Maritima, not as a theme.
Consistent with the global brand, built for the local market
Before designing anything, we benchmarked against the brand's other markets: the Brazilian flagship site set the visual standard, the French site showed how the brand travelled, and the in-production US store previewed where the brand was heading. The Singapore store had to sit comfortably in that family while serving local shoppers.
We structured the full product catalogue (bikinis, one-pieces, resortwear, accessories) into collections and categories that make a large range easy to browse, and set the store up so the local team could manage products, inventory and new collections themselves.
Marketing wired in from day one
A launch store with no way to talk to customers is a dead end. We integrated Mailchimp with the store so every sign-up and customer flowed into an email list the team could use for collection launches and nurture campaigns, giving a brand-new market entry a way to build an audience from its first sale.
The Solution
What we delivered
Cia Maritima launched into Singapore with a digital flagship that matched its global standard, and it stuck. Years on, ciamaritima.sg is still the brand's Singapore store, still on the Shopify platform we set up, now selling in eight currencies to customers across Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the UK and beyond.
The strongest evidence is what happened next: the online store did its job well enough that the brand deepened its Singapore presence, opening a physical outlet at the new Tanglin Mall. That is the direction every market-entry ecommerce project hopes for (web first, retail floor second), and it only happens when the online store proves the market.
What we learned
Platform loyalty is for agencies, not clients. We build most of our work on WordPress and WooCommerce, but Cia Maritima needed speed to market, bulletproof checkout and near-zero maintenance for a small team, and Shopify was the right answer. Recommending against your own default is uncomfortable exactly once; after that it becomes the reason clients trust the rest of your advice.
The other lesson is that for an international brand, the design brief already exists. The Brazilian, French and US sites told us what Cia Maritima should look like; our job was translation, not invention. Benchmarking the brand's other markets before opening a design tool saved rounds of revisions and produced a store the parent brand recognised as its own.
