Switching to Horizon theme drives conversion and saves money for Dermalogica

Dermalogica has always been committed to staying ahead. Founded in 1986, the skin care brand has pioneered rice-based enzyme powders, biomimetic botanical blends, and something called Exo Booster—“the first bacterial exosome system in regenerative skin care.”

But by early 2025, Dermalogica’s ecommerce setup wasn't keeping pace. Their existing theme, built on Shopify’s “Dawn” foundation, had become 60% custom code. Internal teams couldn't build pages or customize banners without opening developer tickets. And developers were spending time on repetitive tasks instead of innovating.

For a brand obsessed with the cutting edge, it wasn't sustainable.

In May 2025, a solution arrived with the launch of Shopify new theme foundation, Horizon, which is designed to offer flexibility without cumbersome code requirements.

So instead of continuing to customize Dawn, Dermalogica switched to Horizon entirely.

"As times get tougher, it's time to take a bigger leap," Eddie Dunk, Senior E-commerce Manager for Dermalogica UK, says. "We're trying to achieve something different and trying to be ahead."

Since switching to Horizon in September 2025, Dermalogica has seen:

• A 9% lift in store conversion
• £30,000 ($39,000) annual savings by simplifying their tech stack
• A 40% reduction in developer time spent on maintenance
• 12% faster page loads

In short, Dermalogica is moving faster, cheaper, and more efficiently with Horizon. Here’s how they did it.

Challenge

Dermalogica migrated to Shopify in 2021 and hummed along with Dawn for years. But as the brand grew and iterated, their setup started to show cracks.

By early 2025, the majority of their Dawn theme was custom code. What started as a clean foundation had gotten a bit clunky. Every new feature, request, and update required a developer ticket.

This bottleneck had downstream effects on Dermalogica’s resources. Instead of building innovative features that pushed the business forward, developers were stuck constructing page templates, adding banner fields, and tweaking section layouts. The pace was holding them back from the bigger, more impactful work they should have been doing.

Adding to the complexity, Dermalogica was running Dawn across numerous implementations: one for the UK market, another for Ireland, and dozens more. Any theme update or fix had to be applied many times over, multiplying the time and effort required to keep everything current.

For a brand that prides itself on staying ahead, the status quo wasn't working.

Solution

Dunk decided to migrate to Horizon shortly after its launch, a move that wasn't without risk. Horizon was brand new, still evolving, with updates rolling out weekly. But Dunk saw the opportunity: If Horizon delivered on its promise of flexibility, it could give Dermalogica’s teams—the ones without developers—the autonomy they desperately needed.

That became the internal pitch: "Giving non-technical teams the ability to make pages and customizations on the fly and iterate a lot more on their own and be a bit more autonomous." Leadership bought in.

From there, the migration process moved quickly—about two months total, in between day-to-day projects. Working with external developer Ben Henry, Dunk and his team set out to replicate their heavily customized Dawn setup in Horizon. What they found surprised them. Features that required extensive custom code in Dawn could be built using Horizon's native settings alone.

Advanced features like complex banner layouts, which previously required bespoke development, could be built in the theme editor with native blocks. Henry estimates that Horizon delivered "almost 90% of the way there out of the box," with only the final touches needing custom work for Dermalogica-specific needs.

Given the brand’s complex requirements across multiple markets, that was a revelation. Horizon wasn't just flexible—it was enterprise-ready.

Results

Dermalogica launched on Horizon on September 1, 2025. The numbers tell the story. Looking at the 30-day average prior to launch versus the 30-day post-launch average, Dermalogica saw:

• 9% increase in conversion rate
• 12% improvement in Largest Contentful Paint (how quickly the main content loads)
• 15% improvement in Interaction to Next Paint (how fast the site responds to clicks and taps)
• Cumulative Layout Shift reduced to 0.01 (virtually eliminating page jumping during load)

Faster pages, smoother interactions, rock-solid layouts—and more customers converting. The performance gains translated directly into business results.

And the financial impact went beyond conversion rate. By switching to Horizon, Dermalogica eliminated over £30,000 ($39,000) in annual costs by using Horizon’s native personalization, search functionality, and page builder. Functions that previously required separate subscriptions were now baked into the theme.

For developers, the shift was just as meaningful. Tasks that used to consume hours could now be handled through the theme editor. The four-step "how to use" guide on Dermalogica's product pages, for example, required custom template code on Dawn. On Horizon, Henry simply created a metafield in the editor and pulled in the data. Done.

And those promises of autonomy they used to get leadership on board? Those came to life, too. The merchandising team, once limited to whatever settings developers had pre-built for them, can now build full pages without opening a single ticket.

When they want to prototype something new—say, a custom section for a campaign or a homepage banner—they use Horizon's AI tools to quickly spin up a proof of concept. If it works, the development team polishes it. If it doesn't, they move on. No wasted tickets. No bottlenecks.

The flexibility that Horizon promised—and that Dunk used to sell the project internally—has become the day-to-day reality.

"We genuinely do really love it," Dunk says.