Citizen M
Hotels order what they need to stay open, from a catalogue scoped to each one.
A B2B ordering and distribution platform, with per-hotel catalogues and pricing, international fulfilment, and the order backend behind it.
Sector
Hotels, B2B supply
Engagement
Client · B2B ordering and distribution platform, built on Shopify
Technical health
Not published. A sign-in gated platform cannot be measured from outside it, and its numbers are the client’s in any case.
The brief
Where it started
Citizen M supplies the operating stock that keeps citizenM hotels running, and since Marriott’s acquisition of citizenM, Marriott hotels too. In the trade the category is OS&E, operating supplies and equipment: the napkins, cutlery, crockery, glassware and bedding a hotel gets through, rather than the furniture it keeps.
This is not a shop. Each hotel signs in to a catalogue scoped to what that hotel may order to stay operational, at pricing set for it, and the order fulfils from local distribution to that building. The customer is a hotel, the buyer is a team on shift, and the catalogue is different for every one of them.
The failure mode is specific, and it is not lost revenue. A hotel that cannot reorder bedding has rooms it cannot turn around; a hotel that cannot reorder cutlery has a restaurant it cannot open. Ordering has to work on a Tuesday morning when somebody counts the linen cupboard and finds it short.
The work
What we did
An ordering platform where the catalogue a customer sees is a function of who they are, rather than one shop with a discount applied at the checkout. A hotel signs in and sees its own list.
Per-account pricing and permissions, so a hotel sees what it may order and does not see what it may not. That distinction is the product: an OS&E catalogue that shows everything to everybody is a procurement problem rather than a solution to one.
International distribution, with orders routing to the local operation serving that hotel rather than shipping napkins across a border because the catalogue only knows one warehouse.
The order backend behind all of it, which is the part nobody sees and the part that has to be right. It is the half of this build that took the time.
Candour
Where it stands
Live and running. We build and support the platform, and the estate it serves grew with the Marriott acquisition rather than pausing for it.
It is sign-in gated, so there is nothing on this page to click through to and no screenshot we can show. That is a property of the work rather than a gap in the write-up.
No figures, and in this case no pictures either. It is the least showable thing we have built and one of the largest.
In one line
Client B2B platform, sign-in gated. Nothing public to show or link to. No figures published.
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