A Melbourne skincare founder says one website migration cost her the company and her family home. The headline version is everywhere this week: Adorn Cosmetics moved onto Adobe's ecommerce platform, sales fell about 30 percent, and now the brand is closing.
I would love to pin this one on Adobe. The longer I dug into the Adorn Cosmetics Adobe migration, though, the less the headline held up. The new site launched in 2021 and the business is closing in 2026, and a lot happens in five years that has nothing to do with which platform you run on. Here is what the public record actually shows, plus a lesson every ecommerce operator can use from the founder's own account: paid ads that were not linking back to the site, and the question of who was supposed to catch that.
The short version:
- Adorn ran on free, open-source Magento from the day it launched and upgraded to Adobe Commerce, the paid version of the same platform, with the new site set to go live on September 29, 2021.
- Founder Briony Kennedy told 7NEWS that sales dropped "about 30 odd percent" when the site launched, and that the ads she was paying for "were not linking back to the website."
- Adobe declined to comment for legal reasons, and a mediation attempt failed. This is one side of an active dispute.
- The launch landed right as the pandemic ecommerce boom ended. In 2022, Australian online spending grew just 1.7 percent, and online health and beauty spending fell 3.9 percent.
- A broken launch can wound a brand, but whatever happened between 2021 and 2026 likely has more than one cause.
What happened to Adorn Cosmetics?
Adorn Cosmetics, a Melbourne natural skincare and makeup brand founded by Briony Kennedy, is shutting down, and Kennedy blames a failed move to Adobe Commerce. 7NEWS reported on November 8, 2026 that the company was expected to close the next day and that Kennedy faces bankruptcy.
In the 7NEWS report, as covered by PPC Land, Kennedy said, "When the site actually launched, our sales dropped instantly by about 30 odd percent." She said Adorn was spending roughly $1 million a year on Instagram and Facebook ads, and that "all of those ads that we were paying for were not linking back to the website." She said she could not get out of her contract, let staff go, sold the family home, and eventually rebuilt the store on Shopify. 7NEWS said that move came too late. The report named Convert Digital, a local agency, as the firm that implemented the change.
7NEWS said Adorn was turning over about $6 million a year at its peak, without saying which year that was, and none of the sales numbers have been independently verified. Adobe told 7NEWS it would not comment for legal reasons, and a mediation attempt between the parties failed. We are hearing one side of a dispute, and it is worth reading it that way.
Did Adobe Commerce cause Adorn Cosmetics to close?
Probably not by itself. Adorn had been on Magento since launch, Adobe Commerce is the paid version of that same software, and the problems Kennedy describes sound like implementation and launch problems more than software problems.
Adobe bought Magento in 2018 for $1.68 billion. Adobe Commerce is built on the same core codebase as Magento Open Source, with paid modules and Adobe support layered on top. Adorn was upgrading inside the same software family rather than jumping to a stranger's, which is a lower risk move, at least on paper.
That does not mean the move went well. SheCom's write-up of a July 2025 interview with Kennedy says she was promised a 30 percent increase in sales by "a well-known platform and its partners" and got a 30 percent drop instead, losing over $500,000 to site rebuilds, wasted ad spend and a worse customer experience. I believe her that it hurt. What I do not see anywhere in the reporting is a technical cause that points at the software itself rather than at how the new site was built, mapped and launched. Nobody has said who owned the redirects, the ad landing pages or launch testing, and that is the question this whole story turns on.
Why does a 2021 launch matter for a 2026 closure?
Timing matters because Adorn's new site went live in late 2021, right as the pandemic ecommerce boom was ending, so the launch-day sales drop Kennedy describes got stacked on top of an industry-wide slowdown.
Inside Retail reported that the new Adobe Commerce site was set to launch on September 29, 2021. Within months, the whole channel cooled. Australia Post's 2023 ecommerce industry report found Australians spent $63.8 billion online in 2022, up only 1.7 percent on 2021, and online health and beauty spending fell 3.9 percent. Online beauty brands were fighting a softer market at the same moment Adorn was fighting its own website. Nike's stock set its all-time closing high in November 2021 and has fallen about 78 percent since, which I wrote about in the Nike S&P 100 removal piece.
I know plenty of ecommerce brands that are 30 to 40 percent smaller than they were in 2021. Those years were not normal. If you planned your team, your inventory and a big platform bill around a pandemic run rate, the correction was going to hurt no matter what software you were on, and planning for that correction is the operator's job.
The founder's own tone right after launch is worth noting too. In an Add To Cart podcast episode published November 8, 2021, roughly six weeks after the planned go-live (the recording date is not given), Kennedy called the upgrade "a very costly exercise" that she expected to prove worth it, and said most pages now loaded in about half the time they used to. She also said they had to raise prices on some core products after not raising them for five years. That is hard to square with sales dropping "instantly" at launch, though it is possible the damage simply had not shown up yet.
How do ads end up pointing at broken pages after a site migration?
Usually because product and landing page URLs change during the rebuild and nobody redirects the old ones, so every ad, email and search result still aimed at an old address lands on an error page.
Paid social ads are rarely aimed at a homepage. They point at a specific product page or a specific landing page. If the new site changes that page's address, even slightly, the ad keeps sending people to the old one. Without a permanent redirect from the old URL to the new URL, the shopper hits a dead page and leaves. Google's own site move guidance says to build a full map of old URLs to new URLs before you move, use server-side 301 redirects, and keep them in place for at least a year. That is standard migration hygiene, and it belongs to whoever builds and launches the site, with the merchant signing off on it.
None of the reporting says exactly what broke at Adorn or how long it stayed broken. Kennedy's description fits this pattern, though that is my read of it rather than a confirmed cause.
How could nobody catch ads running to broken links?
It comes down to ownership. The agency building the site, whoever runs the ads, and the founder can each assume someone else is checking what happens after the click, so nobody does.
This is the part of the Adorn Cosmetics story I keep coming back to. A broken link on launch day happens. A broken link two weeks later is a process failure. We do not know how long Adorn's ads pointed at the wrong pages, but spending real money for any stretch to send people to pages that do not work should never happen, because the warning signs are loud. Clicks hold steady while purchases fall off a cliff, return on ad spend craters, analytics fills up with error pages, and customers start messaging to ask why the link does not work.
The ad platform will not catch it for you. An ad account keeps spending whether the page behind the ad converts or not. It reports the spend accurately, and it has no reason to care where the click lands.
At BattlBox, an agency runs our paid ads, which is normal for brands our size. That setup works fine as long as everyone knows who owns the moment a customer clicks. When a site launch involves a build agency, an ads team and an in-house crew, that moment belongs to everybody, which in practice means nobody. Someone has to own it by name, and that person should be clicking every live ad on launch day.
What should you check on launch day of an ecommerce site migration?
Click everything that sends you traffic, from the customer's side, on the day the new site goes live, and keep watching the numbers daily for the first two weeks.
- Every live ad in every ad account, clicked from a phone, all the way through to checkout.
- Every link in your active email and SMS flows, especially welcome, abandoned cart and winback.
- Your top Google landing pages, checked one by one against the redirect map.
- Conversion rate, revenue per session and return on ad spend, compared daily against the weeks before launch.
- The 404 or page-not-found report in your analytics, reviewed every day.
- Customer service tickets that mention links, checkout or "the website."
None of that takes technical skill. It takes one named person and an afternoon. It is the same boring discipline as deleting your test coupon codes before a bot finds them. Against a reported ad budget of about $1 million a year, an afternoon of clicking is the cheapest insurance in ecommerce.
What is the real lesson from the Adorn Cosmetics Adobe migration?
Know who owns every piece of a migration, plan your business off normal years, and when a launch goes wrong, fix it or roll it back fast, in days rather than months.
Kennedy said she could not get out of her contract. Before signing any multi-year platform or agency agreement, read the exit terms as carefully as the sales deck, and ask what happens if the promised results do not show up. A projected sales lift in a pitch is only a projection, and you usually cannot hold anyone to it later. Once you are live, set a short window to judge the launch. If the numbers are badly off and the fixes are not landing, that is the moment to escalate hard or change course, before the losses compound for years.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Adorn Cosmetics closing?
Founder Briony Kennedy says a failed 2021 migration to Adobe Commerce cut sales by about 30 percent and sent paid ads to pages that did not work. Adobe declined to comment for legal reasons, and the claims have not been independently verified.
When did Adorn Cosmetics move to Adobe Commerce?
Adorn's new Adobe Commerce site was set to launch on September 29, 2021. Before that, it had run on open-source Magento since the brand launched.
Is Adobe Commerce the same as Magento?
Adobe Commerce is the paid, enterprise version of Magento. It shares the same core codebase as Magento Open Source and adds paid features and Adobe support. Adobe bought Magento in 2018.
Who built the Adorn Cosmetics Adobe site?
7NEWS reported that Convert Digital, a local agency, implemented the change. The reporting does not describe the agency's scope or its role in the contract.
How do you avoid broken links after a website migration?
Map every old URL to its new URL, set up permanent 301 redirects before launch, keep them for at least a year, and have one named person click every live ad, email link and top search result on launch day.
Did Adorn Cosmetics move to Shopify?
Yes. According to 7NEWS, Kennedy rebuilt the store on Shopify after abandoning the Adobe site, but the report said the move came too late to save the business.
Final Thoughts
I feel for Briony Kennedy. She built a real brand over more than a decade, and nobody deserves to sell their house trying to save it. I also think the "website migration destroyed a company" headline teaches the wrong lesson. A bad launch can absolutely wound a business, and a contract you cannot exit makes it worse. Whatever happened between 2021 and 2026 likely has more than one author: an expensive bet placed at the top of a boom, a market that cooled right after, and, by the founder's account, ads that sent paying clicks to pages that did not work. Platforms do not click your ads. People do, and one of them needs to work for you.
Interested in learning more?
- Nike S&P 100 Removal: How Firing Its Own Retailers Erased $230 Billion
- Stop Wasting Time and Money on Custom Shopify Design
- AI Search Visibility for Shopify: What I Set Up to Get a New Store Found by AI
- Always Delete Your Test Coupon Codes Before a Bot Finds Them
