Anatomy of an engagement: Xposed Designs

Case study pages compress months of work into a tidy grid. This post decompresses one. Xposed Designs manufactures thermoformed cosplay armor in the US, and their engagement with us is a clean example of what "we run the whole owned-channel stack" means in practice, decision by decision.

The starting position

When they came to us in 2025, Xposed Designs was a top-rated marketplace seller with a 4.9-star, multi-year reputation, and almost nothing they owned. No email list, no blog, no CRM, no storefront of their own. Most traffic flowed through a single third-party surface. That is a strong business balanced on someone else’s platform: one algorithm change or policy dispute away from losing its primary channel.

The brief we agreed on was not "build a website." It was: stand up the rest of the digital presence, at a pace the owner can sustain alongside manufacturing. That last clause shaped everything. A solo manufacturer cannot absorb five new systems in a month, so the engagement was sequenced rather than dumped.

What shipped, in order

• Branded storefront first: custom store, product catalog with real variant structure (DIY kits, assembled, painted and unpainted, expedited options), branded checkout, and variant imagery worked through incrementally with existing photography rather than waiting on a full reshoot.

• Email and SMS foundation second: the owned-channel platform set up end to end, the list bootstrapped from existing customers, opt-in flows live. Unglamorous, and the prerequisite for every marketing dollar that follows.

• Managed paid ads third: a creative set built, reviewed, and revised with the owner, then a managed campaign backed by a 3x ROAS guarantee, because we price ads against outcomes, not activity.

• Blog and content engine fourth: tutorials, difficulty rankings, and attachment guides, so search traffic compounds on a domain they own instead of leaking to the marketplace.

• Marketplace optimization throughout: a full catalog audit against current algorithm behavior, delivered as an optimization sheet the owner implements directly. The point was never to abandon the marketplace; it was to stop depending on it alone.

What "ongoing" actually means

The shipped list is half the engagement. The other half is operational: store maintenance, variant imagery rollout, list segmentation, campaign sends, SMS flows, and conversion work against the repeat-customer base. Social content production runs per product launch. Seasonal peaks get prepared in advance, with ads, email, SMS, and inventory-aligned listings ready before the holiday rush instead of during it.

The current build is a unified inbox for custom orders: one place where marketplace messages, email, and social DMs land together. Custom work is the highest-margin revenue in the business, and those inquiries were the ones scattering across channels. It is the same pattern we wrote about earlier this month, showing up exactly where the money is.

The shape to notice

Notice what the engagement is not. It is not a redesign. It is not a campaign. It is a manufacturer going from one rented channel to two sales channels, an owned list, an owned content surface, and a marketing operation that runs whether or not the owner had a good week. Each piece was scoped to survive: the year-five test applied to a business that plans to be here in year five.

The deliverable was never a website. It was a business that no longer depends on a single platform’s goodwill.

The condensed version, with metrics and the full scope grid, is in the portfolio. If your business is balanced on one rented channel, the sequence above is roughly what fixing it looks like.