valantic NL

Description

Since 2013, German outdoor brand Jack Wolfskin had been running on a heavily customized platform. To reduce TCO and gain flexibility, the company chose Shopify. valantic helped turn the migration into a future-proof online store, rebuilding existing enterprise features—from loyalty programs to merchandising—in a smarter way.

Solution

The final platform and partner choices were driven by the need for:

• A modern, API-first commerce foundation
• A powerful search and merchandising solution that marketing teams could manage with ease
• Partners who understood the Jack Wolfskin brand and its long-term vision.

For the search, merchandising, and recommendation capabilities Jack Wolfskin was used to, the choice was Voyado, which provided the intelligence layer for product discovery and relevance.

valantic translated these principles into a practical implementation, guided by one clear rule: use Shopify wherever possible, and build custom solutions only where the business truly needs them:

• Discovery of the existing ecosystem: Working with several Jack Wolfskin teams, valantic mapped existing customer journeys, content and campaign processes, CRM and loyalty requirements, international market setup, and custom functionality. The goal was to identify what needed to be retained, what could be simplified, and what could be replaced with standard functionality.
• Rebuilding the storefront on Shopify: Familiar e-commerce elements such as banners, content sections, product carousels, and filters were redesigned within the Shopify environment to align with Jack Wolfskin’s refreshed brand experience.
• A custom integration layer between Shopify and Voyado: Rather than use an off-the-shelf connector, the development team built a custom accelerator to make Shopify data available in Voyado, and adapted storefront templates to display Voyado data throughout the customer journey.
• Custom My Account & Loyalty functionality: Shopify’s new Customer Accounts were extended with custom apps and extensions to support real-time loyalty data, country-specific customer information, vouchers, and points promotions—features Jack Wolfskin was used to having in its external CRM system.
• A custom store locator: To gain greater control over the look and feel, data, and on-site integration, valantic built a custom store locator.
• A single international foundation with Shopify Markets: The previously separate country-specific domains were brought together under one central domain, jack-wolfskin.com, with a language and configuration for each market through Shopify Markets.
• A refreshed brand experience: The migration was also an opportunity to update the digital brand experience, giving Jack Wolfskin’s signature yellow a stronger role and creating a cleaner visual hierarchy.

Results

One centralized, internationally scalable platform instead of separate country-specific domains. The project also delivered:

• A storefront that feels seamless across key shopping journeys, including product listings, filtering, and product pages
• More relevant product discovery and merchandising thanks to Voyado’s dedicated search and recommendation layer, while preserving business-critical loyalty and CRM functionality
• A simpler foundation for adding new countries, languages, and markets through Shopify Markets
• A fresher, more modern brand experience that better reflects Jack Wolfskin’s updated brand identity
• A modular architecture that lets specialized features such as search and loyalty continue to evolve independently

At the same time, the project offers a more nuanced perspective on TCO in a SaaS migration: lower platform costs don’t automatically mean lower overall costs when an enterprise organization wants to replicate existing custom functionality one-to-one. For Jack Wolfskin, the key to building a future-ready commerce foundation was finding the right balance between standardization, targeted customization, and specialization.