Shape
A merchant with a multi-supplier catalogue running to hundreds of thousands of SKUs across deeply interrelated fitments and diagram-led navigation. The senior team were very technical and understood what they wanted but needed to ‘see it’ before making the board decision to go forward with a platform choice.
What the engagement looked at
- Data model considerations — how to represent diagrams, fitments, and cross-references so the merchandising team can edit them without engineering and without breaking relationships.
- Search architecture at a high level — what a search index has to support (part-number lookup, cross-reference, fitment-aware results), and how the data has to flow to keep it usable as the catalogue grows.
- Sync shape — keeping a search index and a platform catalogue aligned without painful nightly rebuilds becoming the team’s whole life.
- One source of truth per relationship — how to design metafield-driven relationships so a SKU appears everywhere it should without anyone editing it twice.
What was handed over
A written data-model document, a search-architecture outline, along with a low fidelity interactive site with real data for live review during the board meeting.