In the midst of a change in ownership, Boardriders came to SLTWTR with a need to migrate a portfolio of brands from a legacy tech stack to a streamlined commerce ecosystem on a tight timeframe. SLTWTR was engaged to implement ground-up technology for 5 brands, Billabong Quiksilver, Roxy, RVCA and Honolua, each with an international footprint. The project was centered around a migration from Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) to Shopify.
10 Websites in the initial phase.
5 Liquid theme builds.
400+ Brick & Mortar (POS) locations integrated for loyalty and inventory.
Hundreds of thousands of products.
Millions of customers.
Tens of Millions of orders.
Sounds easy enough. The challenge? Do it all in 3 months.
Theme Flexibility for Storefront Build Efficiency
5 distinct brands, each with their own look and feel could have involved 5 distinct ground-up theme builds on Shopify. SLTWTR identified an opportunity to develop a single multi-brand codebase, which would allow for every functional feature developed to be deployed conditionally to each brand. The necessity for distinct layouts aligned with Shopify's thematic push for extensibility prompted us to develop a modular, block-based authoring experience that allowed for both distinct layouts and conditional feature inclusion. This narrowed the development timeline to only a few high-velocity Sprints for functionality, and each brand being layered in in 1 week each.
Extraordinary Content-Authoring Flexibility
The needs for flexibility in content authoring among all of the brands, regions, campaigns, and customer segments required a level of flexibility uncommon to Shopify themes, and nearly impossible on any other commerce platform. SLTWTR broke the mould of the standard set of templates and sections, and produced a vastly modular, block-based authoring experience that puts the brand in control, and allows for both distinct layouts and conditional feature inclusion.
So. Much. Data.
The data to be migrated was of significant scale: hundreds of thousands of products, millions of customers, and tens of millions of orders. Data migration became the primary focus of the project, with a parallel track to theme development to allow us to move at high velocity through the project. Utilization of Shopify's bulk mutation operations offloaded processing time to Shopify's own servers for highest possible efficiency in data transfer and accountability for accuracy.
Meeting Consumers Where They Are
The new technology stack required a migration from Cegid POS to KWI POS, and an uplift in consumer experience across channels with an integrated loyalty platform. Yotpo loyalty was implemented into the sites for all brands, as well as into the POS system for the accruement and utilization of loyalty points in-store. This initiative unifed consumer touchpoints with the Boardriders' brands, allowing all interactions, both transactional and non-transactional, to leave meaningful marks and build a lasting relationship.
