Perhaps I'm your typical HNer like the GP comment and the topmost comment, but I don't see an issue with changing the style of the font entirely. Sure, it may be jarring to customers, but it's a short term pain for almost zero cost.
The result is not as good as what they had before, and not as good as it would have been if they hired a professional to design a new font from scratch, but it was cheap and solved their problem.
Fonts are weird voodoo. Good and bad choices can both make a measurable difference to ROI.
So I'm not convinced this is going to be the profit booster they hope.