Case Study
“Monolith Is Dead”: How Odlo Kept the Team Lean and Delighted Customers With API-First eCommerce
~ 0 employees
0 countries
0 stores
0 online stores
Exceptionalism is part of Odlo’s fabric. For 80 years, Olympians and adventurers have worn the brand’s temperature-regulating designs on world’s highest peaks. But its mission to push boundaries doesn’t stop at mountain tops.
Odlo is committed to creating innovative experiences for its customers – online and in-store. To elevate their online presence, the brand needed an eCommerce platform that would detangle its previous monolithic complexities and enable its ambitious growth plans. With SCAYLE, they found more than a platform – they found an expert partnership that helped them summit their online goals.
About Odlo
Born in Norway and designed in Switzerland, Odlo has been creating next-gen outdoor performance wear for nearly eight decades. Today, the brand has grown to become a global leader in the industry.
- ~740 employees
- 37 stores
- 30 countries
- 18 online stores
Challenge: A Heavy Monolith Platform That Can’t Move With the Market
Odlo is no stranger to game-changing technology. From the first elastic heat-regulating cross country racing suit to the innovation of the three-layer principle and the first “Effect” fabric base layers that keep wearers smelling fresh: when it comes to apparel innovation, Odlo is always ready to move the benchmark.
But when it came to the brand’s online store, the team was partially locked into a monolithic system that held back their digital ambitions. With the legacy system, they often found themselves caught up in complex, never-ending implementation cycles. “We suffered from huge implementation difficulties which made updating the site and code base to integrate new things extremely challenging,” states Andreas Hindelang, Chief eCommerce Officer at Odlo.
The challenges the commerce team experienced in the backend directly translated to performance issues in the frontend. “Our old eCommerce framework wasn’t on par with the industry, so we were first and foremost looking for improvements related to our mobile and desktop platform, as well as related to speed and page load times,” says Andreas Hindelang.
Being on a monolithic system, they also found there were many functionalities attached to the tech stack they never even touched. As a result, they were looking for a “meaningful reduction in functionality – a platform that would also be a lot simpler and more intuitive to use for the business users.”
The Solution: A Consolidated Setup With Lightning-Fast APIs
SCAYLE’s composable setup, fast APIs, and ready-to-use modular features were the perfect match for Odlo’s digital ambitions. After migrating, which included integrating all systems into SCAYLE and redesigning the entire website experience, process improvements began to show instantly.
“The old platform was not API-first. [With SCAYLE], we really enjoy how easily we can integrate and onboard new partners. It’s also super simple for us to access new content in SCAYLE or the CMS via API to use for other business cases,”
Andreas Hindelang, Chief eCommerce Officer at Odlo
It wasn’t only composability driving Odlo forward. SCAYLE’s unified core components set the tone for success. As Andreas Hindelang explains: “The core is really solid, [we have] almost no reason to contact the SCAYLE team.”
One feature that stood out to him was the SCAYLE PIM. “The integrated product and catalog system management of SCAYLE is really good – it’s working extremely well for us. And the merchandising teams are super happy.”
As part of the migration, Odlo, supported by the SCAYLE team, rebuilt their tracking. The combination of native out-of-the-box features and powerful APIs that connect seamlessly to the SCAYLE panel massively improved transparency. “Since completely rebuilding the tracking with SCAYLE, we figured out that it’s much more reliable and stable than the previous one.”
Across the entire journey – from the migration all the way to the tracking overhaul – it was not just the SaaS integration that delivered, but a trusted partnership driving Odlo’s vision forward.
“Everyone we talk to [at SCAYLE] is qualified and responsive…they are doing everything they can to deliver,”
Nicolas Kratz, Project Manager eCommerce at Odlo
Results: Happier Customers, Lower Costs, Native Stores
New Feature Integrations Customers Love
With the newfound freedom of API-first tech, the team worked with SCAYLE and its partners to integrate features that meet its customers’ unique needs.
“[SCAYLE] allows us to set up new functionalities and processes with minimal development and coding to serve our customers in a better way. It’s a really strong asset.” says Andreas Hindelang, Chief eCommerce Officer at Odlo.
Weather integration
Odlo’s performance gear and base layers are especially designed to keep you warm and comfortable in cold or changing weather conditions. Its products vary from shorts for running on a summer’s day to jackets that can withstand the sub-zero freeze of mountain peaks. So the brand had a vision to help customers find exactly what they need – based on their local weather conditions.
“It’s a feature that we’ve been talking about for years but we never managed to bring it to life,” says Nicolas Kratz. Now supported by API-first architecture, the time was finally right. “It was even something we could do ourselves internally at Odlo, because the system gave us the flexibility we needed.”
The application allows Odlo to identify where the user is located based on their geo-location. Then the system pings a weather service provider to receive information on not only local temperature but also metrics such as sky and wind conditions. This information gets fed to Odlo’s CMS via API.
“We then use it as a trait to create an audience. And they can be combined, for example ‘blue sky, temperature below five degrees, plus hard winds’,” he explains. “This allows us to customize our audiences and our content in a really advanced way. Then we just trigger the correlating content, which could be a banner, a specific promotion, or an automatic discount.”
Endless Aisle
With many of their stores also located in smaller mountain regions where shop floor space is often limited, Odlo has been looking for ways to extend more of their offering to their in-store customers. With SCAYLE, the brand has been working to make that possible. Having implemented the Endless Aisle feature, shop assistants can directly access more colours and styles than customers can find in store.
“Our brand stores are running on the smaller side in terms of shelf space and square meters, so we are never able to showcase the full breadth of our products. The strategic relevance of Endless Aisle is extending the shop floor with additional products to offer the full selection to the customer,” explains Andreas Hindelang.
This way, Odlo’s shop assistants can run through the entire order process on the spot for a more seamless shopping experience in store. “It makes it very smooth and efficient.”
Streamlined Teams and Reduced TCO
Odlo has always strived to be a tight-knit team. “The core team has been with Odlo for over five years,” Andreas Hindelang notes. “We know our processes and data and how they flow inside out.”
When it came to migration, “the core team of the replatforming project was about five people”. Yet, despite the team’s small size, Odlo successfully went live in just nine months. “We are very passionate – we knew what we wanted and what we didn’t want,” he added. It went off without a hitch.
SCAYLE proved to be the perfect platform to maintain the team’s lean ambition. “With the automation we’re able to pull in, we can continue building up our capabilities and grow our business. He explains: “Many of the tools we used to get from third-party providers are fast to integrate in SCAYLE’s modules due to the API-first approach. That really simplifies and reduces the work for our teams at Odlo.” These processes didn’t just help keep the team lean, they optimized the brand’s eCommerce costs. “Overall, we improved significantly on the total cost of ownership,” says Andreas Hindelang.
Ultimately, Odlo’s team didn’t just replatform – they set themselves up for a future where they can grow while maintaining predictable tech overheads.
Super-Fast Localization and an Effortless US Launch
As a retailer running 18 online shops and servicing 30 different countries, getting a platform that would allow them to localize different country shop experiences was also a must. “It’s not a secret anymore that the localization of services is absolutely essential for higher conversion rates. If you’re shopping from a brand or site you’re not familiar with from your home market, you’re looking for them to use partners you can trust,” says Andreas Hindelang.
This is especially true for local payment and carrier options. Andreas Hindelang finds the conversion uplift to be significant since they have been able to implement more localized providers. “What we’re seeing is basically an uplift of [up to] 50% if we offer localized payment or carrier methods.”
So being able to add checkout integrations as needed was also on their platform checklist – a feature they found many other platform providers were still lacking. “That was no option for us. We would’ve been forced to have another migration on the payment service provider and carrier-side to then end up having fewer options [compared to SCAYLE].”
Using SCAYLE’s checkout enables the team to launch localized payment and carrier integrations with ease. “One of the reasons why we picked SCAYLE was the hosted checkout. As a brand with a small team, we need to rely on partners who are able to provide us with a safe and high-performing checkout system.”
In the past, they managed this part of the business internally. “We carried all that responsibility related to the integration, but also to the card security measurements, and all the standards you need to meet in order to work with Adyen and the likes of PayPal, etc. We are really happy that we don’t have to do that anymore.” And SCAYLE’s express checkout feature is soon going to make the payment process for Odlo’s global customers even faster.
For the Nordic customer base, in particular, Odlo decided to integrate Vipps, one of the most popular payment providers in Norway. As the first SCAYLE customer to use this new payment solution and the implementation went even smoother than hoped. “Once it was made available on SCAYLE, it was quick. One day it was there, we tested it, it was simple – it went fast” said Nicolas Kratz.
Odlo’s US store launch came with its own set of challenges due to the state-based tax system. “In the US they have a very different tax calculation. It’s a three-layer tax system, which includes city, county, and country tax. All that is basically calculated at checkout on the fly, which is quite complicated.” Together with SCAYLE, the Odlo team has been able to integrate Alvara to take this complexity off their plate. Apart from that, the team describes launching in the US as a “no-brainer,” saying, “it’s easy. It’s a country shop like any other once you manage the tax calculation like we did.”
Future Plans
Next, Odlo continues to develop its strategic eCommerce roadmap. Within the next year, the team is looking to create a central digital account for their eCommerce business, retail stores, and loyalty systems. They also plan to improve their marketing automation and user interface on top of creating a more personalized product feed.
Beyond that, the retailer is keen to keep a close eye on disrupting technologies like agentic AI. “We will closely monitor, observe, and test agentic AI and see if we need to make adjustments on our site and platform in relation to the investments flowing into platforms like ChatGPt and Gemini. But I think we are very well positioned with SCAYLE because everything is so accessible. The future is bright,” says Andreas Hindelang.