The Business
Altitude Sports, an outdoor e-commerce clothing company renowned for its extensive range of sports outerwear, outdoor equipment, and urban wear, faced significant challenges with its existing commerce platform. Instead of facilitating their growth, the platform imposed limits on their potential. To overcome these challenges and enhance their site performance, Altitude Sports partnered with Orium to build a modern tech stack that provided better control over product, pricing, payments, and more. As the delivery manager for Orium, I played a crucial role in ensuring the success of this collaboration.
The Mission
Altitude Sports struggled with a monolithic platform that demanded significant effort and cost to maintain. This platform negatively impacted site performance and made their marketing and commercialization efforts heavily reliant on developer support. The use of custom HTML-based templates meant the development team had to manage most front-end changes, hindering improvements to user experiences. This setup severely restricted their ability to efficiently manage and control site content and customer experiences.
The Strategy
To tackle these challenges, we needed to transition Altitude Sports from a monolithic platform to modular and adaptable solutions. This transition aimed to improve scalability, adaptability, and control over promotions and marketing, while streamlining the tech stack and product catalog. The new approach emphasized cross-site content and product syndication to support the next phase of growth.
The strategy included a phased implementation plan:
- Proofs of Concept: Initial proofs of concept were developed to validate the solution architecture, inform backlog estimates, and mitigate risk.
- Phased Approach: The first step involved launching “The Last Hunt” on a fully composable platform, setting the foundation for extending composability to other properties.
Game-Winning Features
We not only resolved immediate challenges but also positioned Altitude Sports for sustainable growth and innovation in the e-commerce space.
The solution focused on transitioning Altitude Sports to headless and composable technologies, providing greater flexibility and scalability. This shift enabled the Altitude Sports team to respond to customer needs and market changes with agility. The phased implementation plan ensured a smooth transition, beginning with proofs of concept and culminating in the launch of a fully composable platform for their key property, “The Last Hunt.”
Adopting a modular approach allowed Altitude Sports to manage cross-site content and product syndication more effectively, leading to improved site performance and a stronger digital presence.
At the heart of this project was a truly collaborative co-delivery model, As the delivery manager on this project I led the teams blending Orium’s expertise with Altitude’s vision. Operating from a single, shared backlog, the teams worked in perfect synchronization throughout the project, cross-pollinating on plans and aligning on implementations to collectively achieve Altitude’s goals. They aimed to bring a modern digital commerce experience to their organization and customers by seeking unification opportunities and collaborating in real-time on shared design files.
- Transition to Modular Solution from Monolith
- Phased Implementation Plan
- Improved Site Performance
- Greater Flexibility and Scalability
- Sustainable Growth and Innovation
