Supernormal Systems era, continuing as a Bryte Labs retainer
Their product catalogue now runs itself: one source of truth feeding Salesforce, Xero and the online store, with nobody re-typing anything.
Merchgirls make custom merchandise for some of Australia’s best-known organisations. Behind the storefront sits real operational complexity: 528 products with 654 variants and over 2,600 quantity price points, quoting in two currencies, with orders flowing through Salesforce and invoices through Xero.
The hard part was never the website. Product truth lived in a workspace database that the team loved and knew, but that was not built to serve a storefront at web traffic scale, and five other systems each held their own partial copy of it. Nearly six thousand historical invoices carried financial links back into that data, so any migration had to move a live catalogue without breaking a single one. Pricing spanned USD and AUD, where a wrongly routed cost quietly distorts margin by six to ten percentage points. And the Salesforce work had to be done entirely through the API, with no access to the admin screens most consultants depend on.
The first phase kept everything the team liked and replaced what was straining. The existing front-end stayed exactly as it was. Underneath it, a new data backbone: the working database stays the team’s daily surface, enrichment flows into Salesforce, invoice items match into Xero by SKU, and the storefront reads from a database built for web scale. Every sync was engineered safety-first: rehearsed in dry runs that write nothing, validated on canary records end to end, and checked for stranded data before anything touched production. The number the client watches weekly: products matching cleanly across systems went from 74 per cent to 97.6 per cent, with zero false matches.
Plumbing that respects the money is not glamorous. It is the difference between a catalogue you fight and a catalogue that works for you.
97.6%Products matching cleanly across all systems, up from 74%, zero false matches
6Systems working as one
Delivered as Solutions Architect at Supernormal Systems.
If your product data lives in more systems than anyone can keep straight, that is a solvable plumbing problem. Start with a scope.