Starfish Project sees what to run next with Marklo

Starfish Project had the data to understand its business — but too much of it lived in disconnected places. Marklo brought the pieces together into one visual view, helping the team see what was happening across the business and, more importantly, what to do about it next.

Starfish Project began in 2006, when founder and CEO Jenny McGee started building relationships with women trapped in exploitation and human trafficking in the red-light districts of her city. What began as a handful of women making jewelry around a table has grown into a social enterprise that has employed and supported more than 160 survivors, pairing meaningful work with vocational training, education, healthcare, and shelter. Every piece of jewelry sold funds that mission. Today, Starfish Project runs as a fast-growing, mission-driven fashion brand, with a small team managing a product line that turns over with each new collection.

From scattered data to a clearer commercial picture

Starfish's paid-media performance had plateaued, and its approach to advertising had become reactive: find a creative that worked and keep running it.

At the same time, the team was manually compiling weekly bestseller and inventory reports and distributing them across the organization. Shopify analytics provided plenty of numbers, but not the visual context needed to quickly understand which products were moving, which were overstocked, and where marketing attention should go next. Access to Meta and ad-related analytics wasn't always reliable, making it difficult to get a clear picture of paid-media performance.

The problem wasn't a lack of data. It was the work required to connect the data and turn it into a decision.

Marklo connects the dots

Marklo brought Starfish's product, inventory, and marketing data together in a visual commercial view.

Instead of looking at raw percentages, Jenny could see product photos alongside performance, inventory levels, overstock signals, and velocity trends — making it much easier to move from what happened to what should we do next.

And Marklo made those connections proactively, without Jenny needing to ask. When she was considering promoting a product, Marklo flagged that inventory was too low to support it — letting the team avoid putting paid spend behind a campaign the product couldn't sustain.

Marklo also surfaced products that were trending down but hadn't been promoted recently — an opportunity that could easily have gone unnoticed across separate Shopify, advertising, and reporting systems.

"What I love about Marklo is that it doesn't just show me another set of numbers. It connects the things I need to make a decision—what's selling, what we have in inventory, what we've been promoting, and what we should think about next. It feels like having the whole business in front of me instead of having to piece it together." Jenny McGee, CEO, Starfish Project

From hindsight to action

Marklo also transformed the team's campaign planning process.

Starfish brought its existing campaign planning spreadsheet into Marklo's calendar, then let Marklo identify opportunities based on overstock, seasonality, and past performance. Brand voice guidelines, saved as standing instructions, gave Marklo the context it needed to make recommendations that fit the brand.

That meant the team wasn't simply using Marklo to report on the past. It was using the history and current state of the business to decide what deserved attention next.

For Jenny, that distinction is the value.

Marklo helps Starfish see the commercial picture, identify the products and opportunities that matter, and make better marketing decisions before the campaign goes live. Instead of another dashboard to check, Starfish now has a campaign planning system that helps answer the question that matters most: what should we run next?