PAPSIEZ

01 · The blank canvas

Turkey’s direct-to-consumer market has crowded fast in the last five years. As marketplace commissions climbed, manufacturers warmed to the idea of owning their own channel. Social media made it possible for small teams to build large brand presence. But entering this market is not romantic. Building a DTC brand means standing up product, identity, store, payments, logistics, content, and ads at the same time. None of these pieces can be isolated — if one is missing, the launch either slips or lands empty.

The PAPSIEZ founder walked into our first conversation with that reality already in hand. The product was clear: design finalized, manufacturer chosen, first sample approved. The audience was articulate too — urban, visually literate, 25-to-40, building a personal aesthetic. The first sales channel would be a direct-to-consumer site, not a marketplace. The founder wanted a relationship with the customer, not a transaction filtered through someone else’s storefront.

But on the digital side, the founder was starting from zero. There was a name and a color palette and not much else. The logo was a draft. There was no website, no Shopify account, no Iyzico contract, no ad account, no email list, not a single product photograph. The launch date, on the other hand, was fixed. The first collection had to be on the shelf in four months, because the manufacturing calendar would not move.

Building an e-commerce store is not technically hard; you can open a Shopify theme in a week. The hard part is getting every piece live at the same time. Brand identity feeds photography, photography feeds collection storytelling, storytelling feeds the ad funnel, the ad funnel feeds the payment flow, and the payment flow connects to the shipping integration. If one piece slips, the domino falls. The founder felt this instinctively, but it was not an equation a single person could solve.

02 · The decision

Our first meeting happened over coffee. The founder put two pages on the table: page one was the product story, page two was the launch date and the calendar. Then a single sentence: “Let’s build this in four months, and let me focus only on the product.” No negotiation, no overstatement — just clarity.

We had two ways to take it on. The first was the conventional agency model: one team for brand, a second team for web, a third team for ads. The upside is that each specialist goes deep in their lane. The downside is that the pieces never quite click, the founder ends up in three different meetings, and the seams show on launch day. The second option was integrated: one accountable team, one decision table, one shared Notion workspace. Engineer, designer, and growth lead in the same standup.

We chose the integrated model. The founder would attend a single weekly review and spend the rest of the time on manufacturing and sample inspection. The contract was specific: at the end of four months, brand, store, and campaigns would all be live on the same day. We would not finish the brand and wait for the store, and we would not open the store and leave the campaigns half-built.

The brief was compressed onto one page: audience, price point, brand tone, scope of the launch collection, and a Q1 conversion target north of 3%. Anything that was fixed got written down, so no one had to guess later.

03 · Building in parallel

When week one started, the real texture of the work showed up. A standard DTC launch looks clean on a sequential plan: brand first, then product photography, then store, then ads. But this build forced four streams to run in parallel, because each one was an input into the next.

The brand stream ran hot for the first three weeks. We finalized the logo, picked the typography, agreed on the dark and light variants of the palette. But the brand work did not end as an abstract design document. It ended when we knew how the brand would look in the Shopify theme, on the product label, and in the Klaviyo email — when every surface had a confirmed treatment. We tested the brand in the places it would actually live, not just on a cover slide.

The store stream ran alongside. We picked a Shopify theme as a starting point and customized the category filtering, the checkout flow, the shipping options, and the mobile experience. The Iyzico integration was live six weeks before launch so the test order flow could be completed without real money. Variant management was tied to stock, and shipping logic was bound to a simple rule that routed between two carriers (Aras and Yurtiçi) based on destination zone.

The ads stream was the most complex. Meta and Google ad accounts were opened nine weeks ahead. Pixels and conversion events were wired into Shopify, but the real work was the attribution layer. Without it, we would be spending blind in month one — was that order from Meta, from Google, or from direct traffic? We standardized the UTM structure, mapped GA4 events to revenue, and pulled Klaviyo email attribution into a single Looker Studio dashboard. Two weeks before launch we ran a soft launch with a small budget so we could find the friction points in the funnel before launch day.

The content stream ran in parallel but stayed mostly invisible. We shot the first collection with a professional set, wrote product descriptions tuned to SEO patterns, and built the About, Shipping, and Returns pages. We wrote six email flows in Klaviyo (welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase, win-back, birthday, new collection) and tuned them to the brand voice. This is the boring infrastructure that carries conversion after the launch wave has passed.

Three obstacles surfaced in month three. First: Iyzico’s small business approval slipped by a week and threatened the launch date. We integrated a second payment provider (PayTR) as a fallback so we would not be single-threaded on approval. Second: in the soft launch data, the mobile checkout showed a 38% cart abandonment rate. We collapsed the three-screen checkout into a single screen, and abandonment dropped to 19%. Third: the first email series opened at 12%. We rewrote the subject lines, added personalization triggers, and pushed the open rate to 28%. None of these were issues that could wait until after launch.

04 · Launch and the months after

The last Thursday of month four was launch day. The store opened at 09:00. The brand identity was live on the site, in the emails, on the product labels, and in the Meta and Google ads — all at the same time. We remember the first order coming in at 11:23. Klaviyo fired the welcome email within eight minutes, the Iyzico payment confirmation returned in seconds, and the order dropped into the Shopify operations panel. The operations team (the founder and two assistants) shipped that first order within 19 hours.

The first-quarter numbers spoke clearly. The conversion rate landed at 3.8%, against a sector average of 1.8% to 2.4% for Turkish DTC apparel and accessories. The average order value finished 22% above the founder’s initial target, because the product page recommendations block and the free-shipping threshold added one extra item per two orders. Order processing time stayed under 24 hours — the most sensitive operational metric for a small DTC team.

On attribution, the three-channel split clarified. Through the first quarter, 47% of orders came from paid (Meta 29%, Google 18%), 31% from organic and direct, and 22% from email automation. The fact that email carried that much weight told us the infrastructure was ready for the second wave — adding a new product later would not require a new agency engagement, because the engine to push it was already in place.

Customer acquisition cost settled at ₺184. Average order value was seven to eight times that, and 18% of customers repeated within the first three months — a number above what we typically expect from a brand this young. For the founder, the most important number was simpler: inventory sold through on the planned curve, and we had to pull the second production order forward.

05 · Today

A year after launch, PAPSIEZ hired its own in-house growth lead and an operations assistant. We had designed the engagement as “build plus handover,” so this was expected. The final month of the contract was reserved for the transfer. The Notion workspace, the Klaviyo flow diagrams, the Looker Studio dashboards, the Shopify theme documentation — everything was handed over with notes.

We continue with a small monthly retainer: performance planning during new collection launches, annual ad strategy refresh, and major Shopify-side updates. The day-to-day store is fully in the founder’s team’s hands.

Two lessons came out of this work. The first: for DTC brands starting from zero, an integrated team almost always beats three separate agencies, because the communication cost between pieces disappears. The seams between brand, store, and ads are where launches fall apart, and an integrated team owns those seams by default. The second: a fixed launch date is not a constraint, it is a discipline tool. When the date cannot move, the team makes real trade-offs every week. “What can we skip this week” turns out to be a healthier question than “how do we make everything perfect.”

PAPSIEZ stands on its own legs today. For us, that is the right kind of ending.