The Brand
Sweet Squared is a leading distributor of professional beauty products, proudly representing premium brands in nails, waxing, skincare, lashes, and foot care across the UK and Ireland. With a mission to empower beauty professionals through high-quality products and expert training, Sweet Squared is dedicated to supporting the success of salons and beauty experts.
That distribution model is what makes product discovery hard. Individual brands in the catalog carry different selling rights by market. One professional hair care brand stocked by Sweet Squared, for instance, isn’t currently available for sale in Ireland. The platform has to know where a product can legally be sold, what it is, and keep it out of listings for shoppers who cannot buy it. Most retailers need their catalog to be findable. Sweet Squared needs parts of its catalog to be invisible to parts of its market, and to stay that way without anyone remembering to check.
The Challenge
Sweet Squared’s previous search and merchandising platform, Attraqt, showed the standard catalog price on every product listing page, even to shoppers with a negotiated B2B or storewide discount. The discounted price appeared only on the product page. The team’s workaround was to tell customers to expect their real price at checkout rather than to see it up front, which put a sales conversation in front of every browsing session.
Catalog and price changes took as long as two hours to reach the live site, and that delay sat in front of every product launch and every price update. The platform also gave Sweet Squared no visibility into what customers were searching for, so the team made merchandising decisions without the underlying demand data. The team could not confirm whether the catalog’s list of best-selling products was even ordered correctly, because there was no way to see or set the sort order.
Region-restricted brands were the third problem. The previous platform had no way to keep a brand a shopper could not buy, such as one professional hair care brand stocked by Sweet Squared was not available for purchase in Ireland, which meantIrish customers would browse and click through to products they were not able to purchase.
Objectives
- Consistent pricing: show each shopper’s real B2B or storewide discount on the product listing page, not only at the product page or checkout.
- Faster updates: get price and catalog changes live in minutes, not hours.
- Search visibility: see what customers are typing, including searches that return nothing, to guide merchandising and stocking.
- Region-aware catalog control: stop showing customers brands they can’t buy in their region.
The solution
Pricing came first. List, B2B, and storewide pricing now update on demand rather than on a fixed refresh cycle, so a price or catalog change reaches the product listing page as fast as the team can trigger a sync instead of waiting on the platform’s own schedule. Salon customers now see their negotiated price from the listing page through to checkout.
Search reporting shows the team what customers are typing, including terms that return no results. That turned merchandising from guesswork into a queue of specific fixes: synonyms and rules built around the language shoppers use rather than the language in the catalog. Manual sort controls let the team see and set how products are ordered on a listing page, so the best-sellers list can be checked instead of taken on trust.
Region control closed the last one. Because Sweet Squared’s catalog carries brands with different selling rights by market, Athos lets the team bury or suppress a brand from a region’s listings. This specific professional hair care brand no longer appears for Irish customers.
Martin Rogers
Implementation
Sweet Squared implemented Athos with Glass Atlas, its digital agency of many years. Most of the backend integration ran directly between Glass Atlas and Athos, and Sweet Squared’s team handled the interface and configuration, with extra training built in to cover features its previous platform lacked. The two teams met weekly through the build, which kept configuration decisions and integration work moving together rather than in sequence.
What “gallon” taught the merchandising team
The zero-result report turned up a word nobody internally had thought about. Salon professionals searched for large professional sizes by typing “gallon,” and the word appears nowhere in Sweet Squared’s catalog because that is not how the products are named or described. Every one of those searches returned nothing, and none of them were visible on the old platform.
Martin Rogers
The Results
Since the move to Athos, Sweet Squared’s overall revenue is up 24.8%, conversion rate is up 19.6%, and average order value is up 16.1%.
- +25% overall revenue
- +20% conversion rate
- +16% average order value
The clearest read on what on-site search itself contributed comes from comparing the two groups of shoppers over the same period. Anything lifting the whole site lifts both groups, so the difference between them reflects what discovery drove.
- Shoppers who used search generated 54% more revenue than shoppers who did not
- Search users had a 27% higher average order value than non-search users
- Search users completed 22% more transactions than non-search users
- Search users bounced 85% less often than non-search users
The pricing and region objectives closed without a percentage attached. Salon customers now see their negotiated price from the product listing page through to checkout, and products no longer appear for regions of which they are restricted.
What transfers to other distributors and retailers
- Hide what a shopper cannot buy, not only what is out of stock. Region-based selling rights are a merchandising problem before they are a legal one. Any multi-brand or multi-market catalog can bury restricted items by region rather than showing the full catalog everywhere and handling the fallout at checkout.
- Close the loop between what shoppers type and what your merchandisers can change. A list of failed searches is only worth having if the fix is a synonym rule rather than a catalog rewrite. Sweet Squared’s customers used a word that appears nowhere in its product data, and the fix took a rule, not a data project.
- Sync negotiated pricing everywhere at once. A B2B or negotiated price is only trustworthy if it shows up consistently from the product listing page through to checkout, on demand rather than on a delay.
- Make your sort order auditable. A merchandising team should be able to see and set why a product ranks where it does rather than take an algorithm’s word for it.
Sweet Squared’s catalog did not change. What changed is whether a professional customer is shown the product they are allowed to buy.
About Glass Atlas
Glass Atlas has worked with Sweet Squared for over six years, a relationship that continues to strengthen over time. The Athos Commerce implementation process was notably seamless, with Glass Atlas highlighting the responsiveness and support of the Athos team throughout integration. Glass Atlas has also rolled out a bespoke loyalty programme that enables Sweet Squared’s B2B customers to earn points redeemable against new products to trial. Looking ahead, Glass Atlas will continue to support Sweet Squared as they expand into new regional markets.
Glass Atlas is the UK and Ireland’s digital commerce agency of choice for transformation and growth. Headquartered in Manchester, it brings together more than 200 specialists across performance marketing and commerce technology, leveraging its strategic partnerships with Shopify, BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce, Meta, and Google to help clients grow beyond their current ambitions. Glass Atlas helps established brands like Richer Sounds, The Grafton Group, American Golf, Footasylum and St John Ambulance navigate their next stage of growth with clarity, craft, and conviction. Summit and Productcaster are the two most recent additions to the Glass Atlas family of brands, having been acquired in April 2026.
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