How MÁDARA Cosmetics Carried Seven Years of Trust Into a New Platform — and a New Sales Channel

"It's one of the few apps that we actually just had to install, do the initial setup and never touch it." — Raitis Cakstins, Web Development Team Lead, MÁDARA Cosmetics

The Challenge

A 20-year brand, a platform migration, and eight markets to serve.

MÁDARA has been a fixture of Latvian culture for nearly two decades. Built on organic formulations and Nordic botanicals, the brand has grown into a publicly traded company selling premium skincare to customers across Europe — primarily women aged 30 to 50, shopping in their own language, in their own market.

Cosmetics is a category built on touch, texture, and smell — none of which translate online. Educating a customer who can't sample the product before buying is the core challenge, and reviews are one of the few tools that genuinely move the needle. "If you have no reviews, people don't talk about your product — nobody's going to buy stuff," as Raitis put it.

Reviews also drive discoverability. The more MÁDARA collects, the better they rank — not just on Google, but across the LLM-powered search engines that are increasingly shaping how shoppers find products. For a brand operating across eight European markets, that compounding effect matters.

When the decision was made to migrate from Magento to Shopify Plus, that seven-year review history was the messiest part of the move. Magento's database structures were messy — duplicates across products, inconsistent SKUs, and mapping problems that required AI-assisted cleaning for the reviews specifically before they could transfer cleanly.

At the same time, the brand was launching on TikTok Shop — a channel where cold audiences encounter unfamiliar brands for the first time, and where verified buyer reviews are often the only trust signal available.

The review infrastructure had to survive the migration and work on a brand-new channel.

The Solution

Social proof that works across languages, platforms, and channels — without the overhead.

MÁDARA uses Judge.me to collect, display, and syndicate customer reviews across eight European markets, their Shopify Plus storefront, and TikTok Shop — all running automatically in the background.

How they migrated seven years of reviews

The migration from Magento required cleaning and remapping over 5,400 historical reviews before import — duplicates removed, products matched, data structured correctly. Judge.me's import tools handled the bulk transfer, preserving the full review history that MÁDARA's customers had built up since 2019.

"The reviews were the messiest part. There were duplicates for two products even if the SKU was different — we had to go through AI mapping and then manual selection. But other than that, simple."

The result: 6,033 reviews arrived on Shopify Plus intact, seven years of customer voice ready to work on the new platform from day one.

How they serve eight markets automatically

MÁDARA's store is fully localised — a Latvian customer sees the site in Latvian, a French customer sees it in French. For reviews to match that experience, the right reviews need to surface for the right shoppers.

MÁDARA French store

MÁDARA Latvian store

Judge.me's language sorting handles this automatically. Since install, it has detected the language of each review and displayed the most relevant ones first based on the shopper's browsing language. 

AI-powered review translation runs alongside it — so reviews in one language are accessible to shoppers in another, at a quality Raitis found comparable to leading translation APIs.

"A person can come in, there's no English, they can see it in their own language — very helpful."

No configuration required after setup. No ongoing maintenance. Eight markets, served automatically.

How they collect reviews

Review requests go out 15 days after fulfilment via a Klaviyo flow — slotting into the email infrastructure MÁDARA had already built, with no duplication of effort.

Incentives are handled separately through their loyalty programme, integrating Judge.me into a third-party loyalty app. Customers earn €1 of redeemable loyalty points for each review submitted — a simple nudge that keeps the pipeline moving without requiring any manual outreach from the team.

Both integrations connected without friction. Judge.me works with over 130 apps across the Shopify ecosystem — loyalty programmes, email platforms, analytics tools — so for a brand like MÁDARA, already running a 20-plus app stack, adding review collection to existing workflows is a matter of enabling an integration, not rebuilding one.

Manual moderation keeps quality high: the team reviews each submission before publishing, with a hidden rate of just 1%. When a negative review comes in, the approach is direct — contact the customer, understand what went wrong, and resolve it. 

Valid criticism gets published. "We do respond to negative ones," Raitis said. "We contact them via email, try to see where and why the issue may have risen. And if it's resolved, we will, of course, resolve it." 

It's a position that treats reviews as a genuine feedback channel, not just a marketing asset. 190 reviews collected in a single recent month.

How they use reviews on TikTok Shop

MÁDARA's TikTok Shop presence started slowly and has been growing rapidly in recent months — driven by strong creator partnerships and expanding sub-channels. The ability to syndicate Judge.me reviews directly to TikTok Shop meant that the social proof already working on their Shopify storefront could carry immediately into the new channel.

"You can just push that to TikTok Shop. What people are saying about our products — it's just a major benefit for everybody."

For a brand reaching cold audiences who've never heard of MÁDARA before, having verified buyer reviews surface on TikTok is the same trust-building logic as on their storefront — just in a new context.

What They Use with Judge.me

Judge.me features

• Review Widget

• Star Rating Badge

• Language Sorting

• Review Translation (AI-powered)

• Store Reviews

• Review Import (historical migration)

• Google Product Review Feedx

Integrations

• TikTok Shop — review syndication

What's Next

With the review foundation in place, four things are already on MÁDARA's roadmap:

AI Product Review Summary. With 6,033 reviews, MÁDARA has substantial customer sentiment to surface. They're planning to activate Judge.me's AI-powered summary in the Review Widget — giving shoppers a quick read on what customers think before they scroll through individual reviews. 

Happy Customers page. A dedicated all-reviews page aggregates product and store reviews in a single indexable location, surfacing for branded and product-specific search queries — a straightforward SEO win given the volume of reviews already in the system.

Store reviews flow. MÁDARA already has 173 store-level reviews. Next step is activating Judge.me's automatic prompt — asking customers for a store review immediately after they submit a product review, with no additional outreach required.

Judge.me × Klaviyo native integration. MÁDARA currently runs review requests through a separate Klaviyo flow. They're looking to connect the two natively — embedding star ratings and review requests directly inside Klaviyo emails, and tightening the link between review collection and their broader email marketing.