Going headless for an international outdoor retailer.
GOREWEAR needed a modern eCommerce solution to bring its global online retail operations under one roof. Codal was proud to help this outdoor gear brand revamp its online shopping experience, reach more customers internationally, and streamline internal workflows by migrating to headless commerce architecture.
Under the W.L. Gore & Associates umbrella, GOREWEAR designs and manufactures cutting-edge apparel products for endurance athletes to enhance their experience in all-weather conditions. Known for its waterproof and breathable Gore-Tex fabrics, GOREWEAR employs extensive research and development to ensure its products are built to support the world’s most elite athletes, no matter what the conditions.
Traditionally, GOREWEAR had contracted much of its eCommerce operations to a costly, inefficient third-party provider, resulting in workflow bottlenecks that contributed to an overall lack of business scalability. Updates to online stores were slow to implement, product time-to-market was constantly impeded, and order fulfillment had a lengthy turnaround time.
GOREWEAR sought to bring all of its eCommerce operations in-house to deliver a superior customer experience, while also streamlining internal processes and procedures. The company wanted two of its sister brands, VIEV and SITKA Gear, under its singular eCommerce umbrella as well.
As a trusted partner to GOREWEAR, Codal’s task was to design and develop a responsive, agile eCommerce ecosystem—able to effectively respond to market trends, customer feedback, and data, and deliver a faster, smarter online shopping experience.
The first step in this project was to complete a full Discovery. Here, the Codal team gained an understanding of GOREWEAR’s current eCommerce ecosystem, from its various tools and processes, to the strengths and weaknesses therein.
Codal worked in close collaboration with the GOREWEAR team to understand the business logic, workflows, procedural tasks, required input/ output information, and solutions necessary for the eCommerce site.
Our team identified, defined, and documented all existing and proposed features and functionality for the site, while determining all relevant third-party plugins for each feature. Based on information gathered during this Discovery process, Codal created the technological roadmap to deliver a transformative eCommerce solution that would bring GOREWEAR into the next generation of online retail.
Codal determined that the best approach for GOREWEAR was to implement a headless eCommerce architecture. In a headless approach, the front-end presentation layer of an online store is decoupled from its back end.
By separating these two elements, GOREWEAR can isolate traditional commerce tasks like product and order management from customer-facing, front-end content. Because its eCommerce data is not specifically tied to a single front end, it can be replicated across multiple different sites—including all of GOREWEAR’s global sites, as well as its sister brands VIEV and SITKA Gear.
Our team architected GOREWEAR’s new eCommerce solution using BigCommerce. Providing a powerful back-end commerce engine to support the brand’s numerous global sites, BigCommerce was the perfect platform on which to design an innovative online shopping experience designed to scale.
We implemented Contentful as a content and channel management solution, allowing GOREWEAR to easily publish and localize content according to the needs of its individual eCommerce sites. With Contentful, it’s easy for the marketing team to manage all of its content—including promotions—across multiple storefronts, while keeping them all connected to a centralized commerce back end.
Next, Codal incorporated Vercel into the GOREWEAR ecosystem, helping current and future in-house developers quickly and intuitively deploy new front-end features and functionality. Vercel is the ideal framework for headless setups because front-end teams can deploy instantly, scale automatically, and easily launch personalized content around the world.
Our team also incorporated a number of third-party plugins to ensure a streamlined front- and back-end experience. These included Salsify for product information management, Klaviyo for email marketing, Yotpo for customer reviews, Avalara for automated tax compliance, and Adyen for payment processing.
Codal delivered a headless eCommerce solution to help GOREWEAR grow its international presence, scale internal operations, and consistently deliver a superior customer experience in the current and future retail landscape.
This project is a solid example of why so many retailers consider headless architecture to be the future of eCommerce. With key functionality like multi-language and multi-currency support, along with the ability to rapidly deploy new content and user experiences across channels, this modern approach enables GOREWEAR—and its sister brands—to be more nimble and responsive to ever-evolving industry trends and customer behavior.
Working with our extensive set of eCommerce technology partners, including the robust BigCommerce platform, Codal successfully crafted a cutting-edge headless eCommerce solution for GOREWEAR that will enable long-term, sustainable growth for its family of brands.
