Cia Maritima
Brazil's number one luxury beachwear brand needed a digital flagship to enter the Singapore market. We built it on Shopify, matched to the look of its stores worldwide, and the store is still trading today.
A customised Shopify store that brought Cia Maritima's brand to the Singapore market and is still its regional flagship years later.
What we were solving
Cia Maritima is Brazil's number one luxury beachwear and activewear brand. Founded in 1990 and backed by the Rosset Group, South America's biggest Lycra fabric manufacturer, it has 35 years of swimwear and activewear behind it. Its fabrics are made 100% in-house in a family factory with over 70 years of expertise, and its LYCRA XTRA LIFE fabric resists up to 10 times more chlorine than standard swimwear fabric. In Brazil alone it sells through more than 1,000 points of sale.
In 2019 the brand was expanding internationally, with sites live in Brazil and France and a US store in production. Singapore was next, and the local business was starting small, selling from the founder's home. It needed an online store that was photography-led, quick to shop, and unmistakably the same Cia Maritima a customer would find in Sao Paulo or Paris.
A template store wasn't an option, and neither was a six-month custom build. It had to launch fast, look like a flagship, and be simple enough for a tiny team to run.
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 drops, a small team, no appetite for server management), Shopify was the honest recommendation. It handles inventory, payments and checkout out of the box, so 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 Shopify themes, and customised it so the store read as Cia Maritima, not as a theme.
Consistent with the global brand, built for the local market
Before designing anything, we benchmarked the brand's other markets: the Brazilian flagship set the visual standard, the French site showed how the brand travelled, and the US store previewed where it was heading. We structured the full catalogue (bikinis, one-pieces, resortwear, accessories) into collections that make a large range easy to browse, and set the store up so the local team could manage products and new collections themselves. Mailchimp was integrated from day one, so every sign-up and customer flowed into a list the team could use for collection launches.
What we delivered
Cia Maritima now trades in Singapore from the Shopify store we set up, selling in eight currencies to customers across Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the UK and beyond. The website is about five years old and the business behind it has kept growing: from a home store to pop-ups, to a boutique at Cluny Court, and in 2025 to a retail space at Tanglin Mall. Expat Living readers have voted it Singapore's Best Swim & Resort Brand four years running. Web first, retail floor second is what every market-entry ecommerce project hopes for, 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.
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.
