Industry: E-commerce, luxury watches · Engagement: In progress

The problem

Luxury Bazaar has spent two decades buying, authenticating, repairing, and selling high-end watches, pieces carrying five and six figures of value, shipping 35 to 40 watches a day. The team knows what they're doing. The infrastructure holding it together doesn't, built one workaround at a time until the workarounds became the ceiling.

The same sale gets keyed by hand into multiple systems. A watch changes identity as it moves from buying to repair to listing to fulfillment, with nothing connecting the records. Labels, wires, repair approvals, and deal context live in WhatsApp threads and Google Chats. Work happens because someone remembers to act, not because a system makes sure it does.

Two executives could ask the same question and get different answers. No one could say why. There was no way to verify it.

The damage shows up in two places. Marketing: leadership doesn't trust the attribution numbers, so ad spend stays capped, every platform claims credit for the same sale, and nobody scales what might actually be working. Customers: most revenue comes from repeat buyers, but purchase history, preferences, and open quotes live scattered across tools, phones, and memory. Outreach stays generic when it should be personal.

The diagnosis

Orbit mapped every system, workflow, and handoff across the company: over fifty tools, platforms, integrations, and channels. The findings weren't subtle. Core metrics like true margin, cost per piece, and commission have to be assembled by hand from systems that contradict each other. Attribution is a black box; once a lead hits sales, where it came from disappears, and credit attaches to whoever closes. Leads go cold because high-value intent isn't recognized or routed. The same deal gets entered five times across Zendesk, WooCommerce, QuickBooks, and two spreadsheets. And the business runs on chat threads that have to be re-read every time someone needs context, context that walks out the door when that person leaves.

Every morning, accounting finishes a cash spreadsheet and messages the founder that it's ready. The founder reads across cash, receivables, payables, credits, wires, trades, and watches sitting at the service center, then decides how much the team can spend that day, by hand. That's how buying capacity gets set. Every single day.

The build

The fix isn't another tool. It's owned infrastructure that makes the business measurable, transferable, and ready for what comes next, in four phases, each paying its way before the next begins.

  • Phase 1, the operating core. Stand up the platform, data warehouse, and marketing activation. Consolidate four email tools into one. Build the first Customer 360 profiles. Deploy a lead-guardian system so nothing goes cold.
  • Phase 2, make it measurable. Capture every sales touch. Build attribution the business owns instead of rents. Ship metrics the whole company reads the same way, and a daily view of cash, capacity, and margin that reconciles automatically.
  • Phase 3, sharpen the engine. Bring inventory and buying under the same intelligence, matching stock to the customers most likely to want it and flagging aging pieces before capital sits frozen.
  • Phase 4, harden for exit. Modernize the legacy systems, close the diligence gaps, and package the business as a clean, transferable asset a buyer can inspect without reconstructing everything by hand.

What's at stake

Customer relationships that live in personal phones can't be transferred. Buying judgment that lives in a few key heads can't be valued. Attribution no one trusts can't justify the spend that would drive growth. A business that answers every question by digging through five systems and three people's memories presents as opaque, and opacity gets discounted at the table.

The work in progress: turning twenty years of commercial proof into something a buyer can see, trust, and pay for.