Orium × Altitude Sports
Freeing a North American outdoor retailer from the developer queue.
Altitude Sports built a thriving outdoor and urban apparel business on top of a monolithic commerce platform — until that platform became the ceiling. Marketing changes required engineering tickets. Page updates required engineering tickets. The team couldn't move at the speed the business needed. Orium led the replatform onto composable commerce, starting with The Last Hunt; I led the delivery.
- Role
- Delivery Manager
- Year
- 2023
- Industry
- Outdoor & Urban E-commerce
- Site
- Visit →
Highlights
- 01Headless commerce on commercetools
- 02Marketing autonomy without dev tickets
- 03Cross-site content and product syndication
- 04Phased rollout starting with The Last Hunt
- 05Improved site performance
- 06Foundation for the rest of the brand portfolio
The Challenge
A monolith where every change cost engineering time.
Altitude Sports had a friction problem. Their commerce platform was monolithic, with custom HTML templates the marketing team couldn't touch on their own. A homepage refresh, a campaign landing page, a pricing rule, a new merchandising experiment — all of it routed through engineering, all of it slow.
Performance was a problem too. The same monolith holding back the team was also holding back the customer experience. And with multiple brand properties in the portfolio, the architecture didn't support reusing content or product data across sites — every brand was an island that had to be maintained separately.
The Approach
Modular, composable, brand-by-brand.
We rebuilt the stack as composable commerce, with commercetools as the headless core, Contentful for content, Algolia for product discovery, and Vercel for the front end. Each part chosen for its job, each part replaceable.
We started with proof-of-concept work to validate the architecture and de-risk the estimates. Then we launched The Last Hunt — Altitude's flagship outdoor property — on the fully composable stack first, establishing the pattern the other brands could follow.
Critically, the engagement was co-delivered. Altitude's team and Orium's team operated from one shared backlog as a single squad, cross-pollinating on plans, design files, and implementation in real time.
The Outcome
Marketing moves without waiting for code.
The Last Hunt launched on composable architecture with the marketing team operating it directly — content updates, promotional pages, merchandising changes shipping without engineering as the bottleneck. Site performance improved. The brand has a foundation that scales to the next portfolio rollout, and a content/product syndication model that finally treats the brand family as one connected ecosystem.
Stack
