Most ecommerce teams treat a platform migration as a project with a start date and an end date. Craig Mildenhall, GM of Digital at Kathmandu, treated it as a pressure test. Four months. A full front-end redesign. A simultaneous CRM switch. And a go-live right in the middle of a flash sale. He’d do it the same way again.
Split the Team. Ring the Bell.
Kathmandu is 150-plus stores across Australia and New Zealand, part of KMD Brands alongside Rip Curl and Oboz. When Craig’s team decided Magento wasn’t working with them anymore, they set a hard deadline around the upcoming winter sale period and worked backwards. Four months. Full front end redesign, new back end on Shopify Plus, CRM migration to Klaviyo, loyalty integration. Five countries.
The way they structured the team is the part worth stealing. Craig split the digital team in two. One crew did nothing but build the new Shopify site. A separate trade crew did nothing but keep the existing business running. They didn’t mix. That separation meant neither team was constantly context-switching between building something new and keeping the lights on, which is the thing that kills most migration timelines.
It also helped that DotCollective, the Shopify partner, came and physically sat in the Kathmandu office for weeks. Not working remotely, not on a Zoom. In the building, part of the furniture, building the kind of rapport that means you can solve problems over a coffee rather than a JIRA ticket. Craig is adamant that closeness made a real difference when unexpected things came up, and they always do.
And there was a bell. Modelled on the Rip Curl Bells Beach bell. Every time the team hit a migration milestone, someone rang it. By launch day it was ringing hard. Finance, who sat in the office next door, probably had a different view on the bell. But those little rituals are what keep a team moving through four months of intense building.
Go Into the Store Before You Trust the Data
Craig’s team built the puffer finder as a multi-question experience. It walked customers through a series of technical considerations to narrow down the right jacket. Logical in theory. The problem became clear when Craig sent the digital team into Kathmandu stores and had them sit with real customers while they used it. The feedback was instant and blunt: too complicated. Just tell me the answer.
They rebuilt it down to three questions. One of which is colour, which isn’t a technical question at all, but turns out to be one of the most important factors in whether someone actually buys. The data would have eventually pointed them in the same direction, but a few store visits got there in twenty minutes.
Craig has been doing this since his adidas days. He put his entire digital team in a store for a day. The clearest insight from watching real people walk through the door: most customers just wanted a white sneaker or a black sneaker. They built a campaign around that single observation and it made millions off one email.
There is something about sitting with a customer that shortcuts everything. They’ll tell you exactly what’s wrong with no filter, and you don’t need a sample size to act on it. Craig now builds it into the team’s process for every new feature. Before it goes live, someone from digital has to have tested it with a real person in a real store. Old school, but it works better than most things that aren’t.
“We made the decision to move to Shopify, and we did it in four months.”
Craig Mildenhall, GM of Digital, Kathmandu
Close the Accordions. Lead With the Answer.
When Kathmandu launched the new site, all the product detail accordions were open by default. Every technical specification, every fabric detail, every use case, all visible on the page at once. It overwhelmed people. So they closed them.
Now the product pages lead with clear, simple signals: waterproof, breathable, done. Customers who want to go deeper into the technical detail can open the accordions and explore. Most don’t need to. They just want to know if the jacket will do the job for their weekend hike, and the page earns its keep by giving them that answer quickly.
The temptation in any category with rich product data is to show everything the brand knows about the product. Outdoor gear is especially guilty of this because there’s so much technical detail to work with. But Craig’s team keeps iterating on the balance between inspiration and information, and it’s one of the reasons the product pages on Kathmandu don’t look like a standard Shopify template even though they’re running on one.
The same principle extends to how they think about merchandising more broadly. The team uses Athos Commerce (formerly SearchSpring) to power PLPs and site search, and they treat merchandising as a daily hands-on job, not something that gets set and left. The balance between what the business wants to push and what the customer is actually looking for is something Craig’s team adjusts constantly, right down to making sure the right gift ideas surface when someone’s shopping for their mum.
“Gut feel can still be a science. It’s all built on your experience in terms of what you tested in the past.”
Craig Mildenhall, GM of Digital, Kathmandu
The Takeaway
The four-month migration got Kathmandu to a better platform. What happened next is the point. The team is in the stores testing features. The accordions are closed. The puffer finder has three questions. The bell is in the office, ready for the next milestone. The business didn’t migrate to Shopify and call it done. It migrated to Shopify and started building.
So what would your equivalent of the bell look like, and when did you last get someone from your digital team in front of a real customer to test something?
Frequently Asked Questions
How did Kathmandu migrate to Shopify in four months? Kathmandu set a hard deadline driven by their upcoming winter sale, split the team into a dedicated Shopify build crew and a separate trade crew keeping the business running, and brought their Shopify partner DotCollective into the office for the build period. They launched a full front-end redesign, back-end rebuild, CRM migration from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Klaviyo, and loyalty system integration across five countries within that window, going live mid flash sale.
What is the Out There Rewards loyalty program? Out There Rewards replaced Kathmandu’s long-running Summit Club in 2023, moving away from a straight spend-and-save discount model toward an activities-based, tiered structure. The goal was to build loyalty around the brand’s outdoor identity rather than leading with discounts, offering things like early access to technical product drops and community engagement rather than making the discount the hero of every interaction.
How does Kathmandu approach product merchandising on Shopify? Kathmandu uses Athos Commerce (formerly SearchSpring) to power their product listing pages and site search, and applies aggressive daily merchandising to balance commercial priorities with customer intent. Product pages use clear visual signals for technical attributes (waterproof, breathable) with accordions closed by default, letting customers who want more detail find it rather than defaulting to showing everything.
What is the “puffer finder” on the Kathmandu website? The puffer finder is a guided product recommendation tool on the Kathmandu website that helps customers find the right jacket based on their needs. It was originally built as a multi-question experience but was simplified to three questions after Craig’s team sent staff into stores to test it with real customers, who found the original version too complicated.
Based on Episode #637 of the Add To Cart podcast with Craig Mildenhall, GM of Digital at Kathmandu. Join the Add To Cart community for free.
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