Case study
Rebuilding Northstar Commerce around how people actually shop
A storefront rebuild that moved merchandising control back to the team that owns it, and took the checkout down to the steps that actually matter.
Concept project: an illustrative case study, not a client engagement.
Challenge
Northstar had grown its catalogue faster than the platform behind it. Every merchandising change needed a developer, seasonal campaigns were built by hand, and the checkout had accumulated four steps that nobody could justify. The team knew where it was losing people but had no way to act on it.
Opportunity
Most of the friction sat in structure, not design. A catalogue modelled around how the team thinks about products — rather than how the old system happened to store them — would remove the engineering bottleneck and make the rest of the work possible.
Strategy
We modelled the catalogue first and agreed what merchandising the team needed to control directly. Only then did we touch layout. Checkout was rebuilt around the smallest set of fields required to complete an order, with everything optional moved after payment.
Execution
Delivered in three releases across two quarters with no trading downtime. The catalogue and campaign tooling shipped first so the team could work while the front end was still in progress, followed by the checkout and then the marketing surfaces.
The part that mattered was the catalogue work nobody sees. We can run a campaign now without raising a ticket, which was the whole point. The checkout change was smaller than we expected and did more than we expected.
Next step
Start a conversation
Tell us what you are trying to move, and we will tell you whether we are the right people for it.
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