Key Takeaways
- OLLY, the gummy vitamin brand acquired by Unilever in 2019 with over $100 million in annual revenue, launched TikTok Shop through Pipe17 in under six weeks, connecting TikTok to Shopify for orders, products, inventory, and fulfillments without requiring changes to the existing 3PL workflow.
- The ecommerce team inherited a TikTok Shop mandate from marketing with no integration plan, no internal IT team, and some explicit adoption prohibitions. Pipe17 filled the gap with managed connectivity that the team could configure without developers.
- Phase 1 generated considerable TikTok Shop revenue over a holiday weekend with no advertising spend, validating the channel before any paid promotion.
- The architecture positions Pipe17 as the future integration layer between Shopify and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations, replacing what would otherwise be a direct connection managed by outside consultants with access to systems the ecommerce team does not want them touching.
- OLLY is the first brand in Unilever’s supplement division to pursue this integration model. Success opens the door to Liquid I.V. and other brands in the portfolio.
Taking Vitamins to a New Level
OLLY was founded in 2013 by Eric Ryan, the co-founder of Method, alongside Brad Harrington. The company reimagined vitamins as something people might actually enjoy taking: gummy-format supplements with ingredient transparency, benefit-led naming, and packaging designed to sit on a nightstand rather than hide in a medicine cabinet. The approach worked. Revenue exceeded $100 million by 2018, and Unilever acquired the brand in May 2019, integrating it into the Health and Wellbeing portfolio alongside Liquid I.V. and other wellness brands.
Today OLLY is available at Target, Walmart, CVS, Amazon, and thousands of other retail locations across the United States. Roughly 80% of revenue still flows through brick-and-mortar channels. But the growth is digital: direct-to-consumer through Shopify, marketplace sales through Amazon, and now social commerce through TikTok Shop. The business sits inside a Unilever division that is actively migrating every brand to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations, with OLLY going first because, in the words of the team, they are “oddly the most organized.”
The product itself creates fulfillment constraints that most supplement brands do not face. Gummy vitamins melt. Every DTC order ships second-day air with cold packs during summer months, adding labor and cost to every shipment. The 3PL, Trinity, operates out of a single warehouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and handles both DTC fulfillment and wholesale pallet shipping. The margin for error on fulfillment timing is thinner than it looks.
A TikTok Shop Mandate With No Integration Plan
The project started the way many do at a brand where digital is growing faster than the infrastructure can keep up.
Marketing wanted TikTok Shop. The VP of Marketing’s team made the decision, set the timeline, and handed it to Jennifer Peters, Senior Manager of Ecommerce, to figure out the integration. There was no internal IT team to build it. The agency partners who managed the Shopify storefront did not have TikTok Shop integration experience. And the one platform that TikTok’s own reps kept recommending was not an option.
“I have two clients who both are having billing disputes with the recommended partner, which is why I won’t work with them. You google it, you start getting into these Reddit groups with developers, you don’t find good news. A hundred percent, I won’t touch them.”
Jennifer Peters, Senior Manager of Ecommerce, OLLY
The underlying challenge was bigger than TikTok. OLLY was built as a brick-and-mortar business. The operations team, accounting, and supply chain all operated with a retail mindset. The accounting team reconciled all ecommerce manually. Internal numbering systems were incompatible with digital channels. And the entire IT function was outsourced.
“One of our challenges at OLLY is that we’re foundationally and infrastructurally built as a brick and mortar business. Probably eighty percent of our revenue still comes from brick and mortar but the reality is that what’s growing is digital. We are in kind of this unique challenge of trying to pivot from this old fashioned brick and mortar infrastructure into something that’s more agile and usable in a digital space.”
Jennifer Peters, Senior Manager of Ecommerce, OLLY
The team needed a solution that could connect TikTok Shop to the existing Shopify and 3PL workflow without requiring the 3PL to change anything, without giving outside consultants access to the Shopify instance, and without requiring developers the team did not have.
Pipe17 as the Integration Layer the Team Could Actually Trust
Jennifer Peters evaluated Pipe17 on three criteria: speed to deployment, the ability to configure without developers, and trust.
“A lot of it for me comes down to just like trust and understanding. I trust you guys and that goes really far with me.”
Jennifer Peters, Senior Manager of Ecommerce, OLLY
The Phase 1 architecture was straightforward by design. TikTok Shop orders flow into Pipe17, which transforms them into Shopify orders. Shopify’s existing connection to Trinity’s Seller Cloud WMS handles fulfillment exactly as it does for DTC orders. Fulfillment status flows back through Pipe17 to TikTok Shop. Product data syncs from Shopify to TikTok. Inventory availability pushes from Shopify to TikTok through Pipe17, keeping the TikTok storefront in sync without a separate inventory feed.
The critical design decision was what the architecture did not touch. Trinity, the 3PL, did not need to install anything, configure anything, or change any workflow. TikTok orders appeared in their system as Shopify orders, indistinguishable from direct purchases.
“We don’t like to ask a lot of our 3PL. We want them to pick and pack orders and ship them. We don’t need them doing software configurations. This gives us more direct control to solve those problems.”
Jennifer Peters, Senior Manager of Ecommerce, OLLY
The contract covered 35,000 annual orders with Tier 4 configuration support. Sergio Oliveira led the implementation on the Pipe17 side. The onboarding followed a standard cadence: kickoff, configuration, testing, and go-live, with the store live and processing organic traffic within six weeks of contract signature.
Live on TikTok Shop Before the Holiday Weekend
Revenue With No Advertising
The TikTok Shop storefront went live in late October 2024 with four SKUs and a gift-with-purchase item, later expanded to eight products. By late November, the store was processing organic orders from TikTok’s algorithm without any paid promotion.
For a channel that the ecommerce team had been “dragged into kicking and screaming,” the early results validated the investment before a single advertising dollar was spent.
An Onboarding Experience That Changed the Team’s Posture
The implementation changed how Jennifer Peters thought about the project and about Pipe17’s role in OLLY’s stack.
“It was as easy as it could be. That team is so awesome. Those diagrams to walk away with are really helpful for the ongoing education within OLLY. It’s been such a good experience truly. I had to be dragged into this kicking and screaming, so it was nice, very nice. Everything’s working well. Everything’s feeding well. I feel like we’re definitely on the right track.”
Jennifer Peters, Senior Manager of Ecommerce, OLLY
The architecture diagrams Pipe17 provided during onboarding became internal education tools, helping Jennifer explain the data flow to stakeholders who had never worked with integration middleware before. For a team without internal IT, that documentation became a reference point for every subsequent conversation about how digital orders actually move through the business.
Bundle Handling for TikTok’s Unique Requirements
TikTok Shop handles bundles differently than Shopify. Pipe17’s TikTok connector includes a native setting that breaks down TikTok bundles and ingests them correctly on the Shopify side, then reconstructs them when syncing fulfillment data back to TikTok. This meant OLLY could offer gift sets and multi-pack bundles on TikTok without changing how the 3PL picks and packs orders.
The Bigger Problem Pipe17 Solved Without Being Asked
The TikTok Shop integration was Phase 1. But by the December strategic review, Jennifer Peters had already identified a larger problem that Pipe17 could address: the Dynamics 365 migration.
Unilever was pushing every brand in the supplement division to connect to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations for financial visibility. The migration was being led by consultants. Jennifer had serious concerns about giving them access to Shopify.
“I’m so thrilled about this because it does take this monstrosity of a project and make it a million times easier. It’s not plug and play, I know it won’t be that easy, but it’s a lot easier than letting consultants into your Shopify instance, which I was not going to do. I have a lot of concerns about the way they would handle privacy and PII. It did not seem to be a concern for them at all. I feel safer having something in between us.”
Jennifer Peters, Senior Manager of Ecommerce, OLLY
Pipe17 as the integration layer between Shopify and Dynamics 365 would accomplish two things simultaneously. First, it would satisfy Unilever’s requirement for ERP connectivity without giving outside consultants direct access to the ecommerce platform. Second, it would give OLLY a managed integration they could maintain without depending on a systems integrator for every change.
“I think Pipe17 is gonna be able to do more stuff for us than just this one thing. I think this solves a lot of problems for us that we didn’t even really anticipate.”
Jennifer Peters, Senior Manager of Ecommerce, OLLY
The D365 connector was scoped as a Phase 2 engagement. OLLY is one of the first brands in the Unilever supplement division to pursue this model, and success has implications beyond the brand itself.
Once the Pipe17 integration model works for OLLY’s D365 migration, Liquid I.V. and other brands in the division have a template to follow. The CTO of Unilever’s supplement division was already scheduled for a January meeting with the Pipe17 team by the time the Phase 1 review call ended.
Why Pipe17
A vitamin company does not run a payment processor, a feed management platform, or an enterprise service bus. The value lives in the formulation, the brand that made gummy vitamins something people enjoy rather than tolerate, and the retail relationships that put OLLY on shelves at Target and Walmart. Pipe17 takes responsibility for the parts of the stack that do not differentiate OLLY from any other consumer brand: the connectors between TikTok and Shopify, the inventory math, the order state management, the fulfillment sync.
“I feel like you are the kind of team we want on our side for this and for whatever happens in the future.”
Jennifer Peters, Senior Manager of Ecommerce, OLLY
The competitive advantage lives in the product and the brand, not in undifferentiated infrastructure. That distinction is what turned a reluctant TikTok Shop launch into a partnership that now extends to the most consequential systems integration on OLLY’s roadmap.
About OLLY
OLLY is a vitamin and supplement brand founded in 2013 by Eric Ryan, co-founder of Method, and Brad Harrington. Known for reinventing the vitamin category with gummy-format supplements, benefit-led naming, and consumer-friendly packaging, OLLY was acquired by Unilever in 2019 and operates within the Health and Wellbeing portfolio. The brand is available at Target, Walmart, CVS, Amazon, and thousands of retail locations across the United States.
About Pipe17
Pipe17 is the AI-Native Order Operations Platform that unifies orders, inventory, products, and fulfillments across commerce channels, marketplaces, ERPs, and fulfillment partners. Backed by GLP Capital, LFX Ventures, and Blumberg Capital, Pipe17 helps innovative brands like Allbirds, Wyze, and MaryRuth, and leading 3PLs like FedEx, Radial, and Ryder eliminate operational chaos, accelerate time-to-market, and scale profitably.