How Barrel Uses Replo To Transform Their CPG Playbook

Barrel is a New York commerce agency that has been building for CPG brands on Shopify since 2009. Its approach to the category is targeted and highly specific, providing an expertise that household names respect and trust.

• The agency: Barrel. CPG commerce on Shopify since 2009.
• Their roster: McCormick, Cabot Creamery, Sweet Loren’s, Wamsutta, Revision Skincare, HALO, aden + anais, and more.
• The Replo setup that works for them: Start in Figma, bring those designs to Replo, move to launch quickly. No engineering queue.

01. An agency specialized for consumer packaged goods

Barrel narrowed its clients to CPG brands, with a focus on food & beverage, health & wellness, beauty & skincare, and home, family, & pet. For McCormick, Barrel pulled Cholula, Frank’s RedHot, Lawry’s, Zatarain’s, and more into a single Shopify ecosystem, so a portfolio of heritage sauce and seasoning brands could launch and relaunch across campaigns without separate rebuilds. For HALO and aden + anais, it was a full move off of Magento. Cabot Creamery, Sweet Loren’s, and Once Upon a Farm sit in the same roster.

Barrel’s client specialization matters because CPG has its own unique playbook. For a brand like McCormick, most of the volume moves through retail, so the brand’s own site is more than just an ecommerce site. It is where the story gets told in full, where a launch lands first, and where a shopper who has just met the product on a shelf decides whether to believe it.

02. Product education comes before selling

Look at what Barrel actually ships for these brands and a pattern shows up.

For Wamsutta, a bedding brand in American homes since 1846, Barrel built their first direct-to-consumer site around a fabric guide that lets a shopper choose sheets by how they feel rather than by thread count, with a history page drawn from the company archive. Wamsutta’s heritage is their key differentiator, so the site leads with it.

For Revision Skincare, webpage wireframes were tested with real users before anything was designed, routines were guided rather than listed, and the product science was shown on the page instead of asserted through vague declarations. One of the pages built in Replo, “Not All Vitamin C Is Created Equal,” educates visitors on the category before it sells a single product.

That is the ecommerce CPG job in one line: the buy box or product section does not always have the opportunity to explain the product in the level of detail a consumer needs, so the site has to supplement that. Pages like these are not decoration around a checkout. They are the extended long-term strategy that pays off in purchases.

03. More designer ownership, less dev time

A strategy like Barrel’s generates a constant stream of page work: a launch, a seasonal campaign, a retail moment, a new claim that needs explaining. The standard agency answer is a queue of to-dos. Design in Figma, hand off to a developer, wait for the theme release, repeat.

Barrel’s answer is their team structure: the designers build in Replo, iterate fast, and the development queue is gone.

Christine Carforo, Barrel’s Design Director, says the designers and marketers “launch and iterate on landing pages without heavy engineering involvement,” moving “from Figma to production quickly.” The designers who set a brand’s visual system are the ones who build and publish its pages, and each brand accumulates a library of reusable sections along the way, so the work compounds instead of starting over.

The comparison is directional rather than timed: building these pages as custom hard-coded pages, “was significantly more time than the time needed in Replo,” and once a brand has templates, the Figma connection “lets us move much faster.” Replo connects directly into Shopify product catalog, metadata, integrations, and analytics to help brands get insights and get up and running in far less time.

The point of the speed is not just in getting things done. As Christine notes:

“This allows our team to go deeper on the strategy and deliver more landing pages to our clients.”

—Christine Carforo, Design Director, Barrel

With Replo, production time becomes time for strategy development, and the strategy is what a CPG brand is paying Barrel for. Replo and Barrel work together to help clients spend their precious hours on high ROI actions and strategy, rather than tedious repeat work.

04. Where Barrel delivers their expertise

Landing pages are not something Barrel discovers mid-project. They come up in discovery, when the shape of the engagement is being set; they introduce Replo “if we believe landing pages are a core part of the project or something the client is already doing.”

The benefit of a landing page is that it can speak more directly to the visitor at the right time, on the right channel. Instead of sending all traffic to a generic page, each ad, each angle, each persona can be targeted with its own intent-based shopping journey and landing experience to drive the most impact.

From there, who operates the pages depends on each client. Some brands want Barrel to own the whole motion from end to end (design, build, A/B test, launch, optimize). Revision Skincare runs the other way: Barrel built the page system, including sixteen reusable sections, and the brand’s own team now does most of the day-to-day editing inside it, with Barrel staying in the loop.

The client gets a site their own people can move; Barrel stays on for the work that actually needs their expertise.

05. How AI has altered Barrel’s workflow

When it comes to their usage of AI and agents in ecommerce, Barrel is much further along internally than most agencies:

“We treat AI as a starting point for almost any workflow. Our approach is to bring the actual problem we’re trying to solve, whether that’s a reporting gap or a process that feels clunky, and build from there. This has led our team to create several internal tools on top of AI, covering everything from finance to account management to talent, things we never would have built otherwise.”

—Christine Carforo, Design Director, Barrel

On webpages, AI already shapes strategy, structure, and the first draft layouts, and carries a good share of the copy exploration across a wide range of online sources. In the future, Barrel views the ideal workflow to include:

“Turn[ing] project briefs into stronger first drafts of landing pages, while training a dedicated AI copywriting agent on each client’s voice and tone. This would allow us to design, write, and iterate seamlessly within Replo, eliminating the need for additional AI tools and creating a more integrated workflow.”

—Christine Carforo, Design Director, Barrel

06. How Barrel grows their clients with Replo

Barrel’s edge with CPG brands has never been about production capacity. Rather, it is knowing what a heritage bedding brand should say about itself, understanding what a clinical skincare brand has to prove, and innovating on how a portfolio of sauce brands shares one platform without losing four unique identities.

Using Replo is how Barrel protects their edge when providing value to their clients: designers own the pages, the systems compound per brand, and the strategy hours stay dedicated to high-impact decision-making.