PHILTER
PHILTER
FROM DEPLATFORMED TO PLATFORM-PROOF
Strategy
- Replatforming
- Open-Source Commerce
- Data Migration
- Fulfillment Automation
- Platform Independence
A DTC brand dead in the water.
Philter Labs makes personal air-filtration devices that eliminate secondhand smoke and odor. Legal everywhere, genuinely harm-reducing, and still categorized by mainstream commerce platforms alongside products they refuse to touch. In July 2026, Shopify banned one of Philter's products with days of notice. Storefront, checkout, customer records, order history, reviews, email flows, fulfillment integrations: all of it lived inside the platform that had just shown them the door. Years of customer relationships were at stake, on a clock Philter didn't control. Philter called Comcreate.
Own everything.
We don't treat replatforming as a lift-and-shift. The mandate was simple: make sure no platform can ever do this to Philter again, and upgrade the customer experience while doing it. We built on Medusa, the leading open-source commerce engine, with a custom Next.js storefront hosted on infrastructure Comcreate manages. No platform fees, no app-store dependency, no terms-of-service exposure. Philter owns every line of code and every byte of data. Checkout runs cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay, including one-tap express checkout straight from the cart, because in a category where processors can change their minds like platforms do, payment acceptance is diversified by design.
Nothing left behind.
Full-history migration: 100,000 customers, 39,915 orders, and 876 verified product reviews imported with their original dates. A returning customer sees their complete order history. A new visitor sees five years of authentic social proof. Philter's third-party warehouse was integrated directly: orders push automatically, inventory syncs back hourly, shipping confirmations with live tracking send the moment a label is scanned, and a daily health check watches the entire pipeline, raising its hand before a customer ever has to.
Parity was the floor.
The replatform shipped capability Shopify either couldn't offer or charged for monthly. A fast, brand-forward storefront with an interactive 3D product experience. A verified-purchase review engine with post-delivery invites, star-gated moderation, and photo incentives, replacing a paid app. A gated wholesale portal with case-quantity ordering, price tiers, and wire-transfer invoicing feeding the same automated warehouse pipeline. A two-tier affiliate program with tracked links and self-serve redemption. Email under Philter's control with an authenticated sending domain, DMARC enforcement, and a verified brand logo in the inbox. An operations-grade admin with Google Workspace single sign-on, a complete audit trail, and custom sales dashboards. And built for what's next: an AI-agent-ready storefront with structured product feeds, plus a fully instrumented GA4 ecommerce funnel ready for paid acquisition on day one.
Zero 404s. Zero bounced emails.
Replatforming is where brands lose their search rankings and their nerve, so we ran it as a precision operation. Every legacy URL from five years of product pages, blog posts, and collection links maps to its new home in a single redirect hop, with a safety net guaranteeing zero 404s even for URLs we'd never seen. Redirect targets were weighted by real backlink data, so the pages carrying link equity keep it. Search engines received a formal change of address, and DNS cut over with email completely untouched. Not one message bounced. Days after launch, the first real customer order ran the entire loop without a human touching it: placed on a phone, pushed to the warehouse, shipped the same day with tracking emailed automatically.
Commerce for the categories platforms won't touch.
Live and taking revenue in 15 days from the decision to leave, with the full domain cutover complete in 19. Every monthly platform and app fee: gone. The stack is owned, not rented, and the operation runs itself with automated fulfillment, hourly inventory truth, and proactive monitoring. A growing class of excellent products lives where mainstream platforms get nervous: smoke-adjacent accessories, CBD and hemp, supplements, adult wellness. These brands share a structural problem: the better they grow on a rented platform, the more they stand to lose the day a policy shifts. Comcreate builds commerce these brands own outright, immune by construction to deplatforming. If your category makes platforms nervous, that's exactly the problem we solve.
01 Owned, not rented. No platform can turn Philter off again.
