About DermWarehouse

DermWarehouse grew out of two family businesses: a dermatology practice and The Media Captain, the marketing agency co-founded by Stefanie Parks and her brother Jason. DermWarehouse became the bridge between the two, a real ecommerce brand built to put that dermatology expertise directly in front of customers rather than staying behind an agency’s client roster.

The Challenge: A Subscription Platform That Kept Breaking

DermWarehouse’s site is about 10 years old. Several years ago, a developer built a custom subscription system for the store, heavily tailored to their setup at the time. Over time, it became fragile. It broke repeatedly, and each failure put a meaningful piece of the business’s recurring subscription revenue at risk.

At the same time, hosting had become its own problem. DermWarehouse was on one of the major managed WordPress hosts, paying around $2,500 a month even as traffic and revenue trended down. The bill kept climbing regardless.

Why Pressable

WooCommerce’s team, who DermWarehouse had worked with for years, proposed fixing both problems in one move: migrate off the custom subscription build onto WooCommerce Subscriptions and WooPayments, and switch hosting to Pressable at the same time.

The hosting move alone was expected to save DermWarehouse $1,000 to $1,500 a month over what they were paying before. In practice, the bigger difference was in the day-to-day experience.

Every site on Pressable gets its own dedicated server rather than sharing capacity with other customers, a detail that mattered even more once DermWarehouse started thinking about moving their agency’s client sites over too.

The Migration

The full project took about six months. The team rebuilt DermWarehouse’s backend from a highly customized, aging setup down to something simpler and easier to maintain, while keeping the site looking exactly the same to customers. PHP was brought current in the process. DermWarehouse served as the test case before the team considered moving anything else.

The Results

• • Recurring revenue protected. A core piece of subscription revenue that was previously at risk from a breaking platform is now running on WooCommerce Subscriptions and WooPayments without the instability.
• • Meaningfully better support. A consistent improvement the team has noticed since switching hosting providers.
• • Dedicated server per site. Every site gets its own resources instead of sharing a pool with unrelated customers.
• • Lower hosting costs. An estimated $1,000 to $1,500 a month in savings compared to their previous hosting plan.

Beyond DermWarehouse: An Agency-Wide Migration

DermWarehouse was the proof point. Stefanie’s marketing agency, The Media Captain, manages around 250 client sites and previously hosted all of them with that same well-known managed WordPress host. Based on their experience with DermWarehouse, the agency began migrating those client sites to Pressable as well, a rollout that has been underway for several months.

Looking Ahead

DermWarehouse is now exploring Pressable MCP, looking at whether connecting an AI assistant directly to their hosting environment could help their team handle routine site operations, useful given the scale of both the DermWarehouse store and The Media Captain’s growing client portfolio on Pressable.

“Moving to WooCommerce, WooPayments, and Pressable, I don’t have any worries about our subscription revenue anymore. The support has been superb, and being able to tell our clients they’re on their own server instead of sharing one, that’s been a huge selling point for us on the agency side.”

Stefanie Parks

Co-Founder, The Media Captain and DermWarehouse