How Universal Standard went from 10 listings to a full catalog on Macy's and Nordstrom

Universal Standard built its name on inclusive sizing, with elevated essentials from XXS to 4XL. Shoppers knew the brand. On Macy's and Nordstrom, though, it barely existed: ten live listings, with a catalog of thousands sitting in Shopify.

"Before Osello, we were nowhere. Ten listings. We barely existed."

Michelle Lee, VP of Product Development, Universal Standard

Why ten listings stayed ten listings

The demand was there. The bottleneck was the work between Shopify and the marketplace. Every new style meant mapping fields by hand, resizing images to each retailer's spec, submitting, and then chasing the rejections that came back.

That process holds up for ten SKUs. It breaks for a full size run across thousands of styles. Hiring more people to push spreadsheets would have pulled the team away from product and growth, the work that built the brand in the first place.

So the question wasn't how to list faster by hand. It was how to get the whole catalog live without a six-month onboarding project.

What changed

Osello connected to Universal Standard's Shopify store and mapped the full catalog to Macy's and Nordstrom requirements: every style, size run and attribute, with no exports and no manual field mapping.

When a retailer rejected a listing, Osello corrected it and resubmitted it automatically. Within five days, listings were in review. Within the week, the catalog was live.

The results

• 5 days from install to the first live listing
• 93% of listings approved on first submission
• Full catalog synced from Shopify to both marketplaces

Listings now stay in sync with Shopify, so nobody re-enters data every day. The operations team is back on product and growth.

"I can't imagine convincing myself, or anyone on the team, to go back to how we did it before."

Stephanie Nelson, Senior Director of Operations, Universal Standard

What other brands can take from it

• Ten live listings usually means the process is the problem, not the product. If every SKU takes manual mapping and image work, the catalog stops growing at whatever your team can type.
• Rejections are where the time goes. First-submission approval matters more than how fast you submit: a 93% approval rate means very few listings bounce back for another round.
• Start from the catalog you already keep. Universal Standard's Shopify data was already complete. It only needed to reach each retailer in the shape that retailer expects.

Watch the interview and read the full story on the Universal Standard case study page.