Running e-commerce for a 200-year-old alpine brand

01The situation

This brand has been making technical climbing hardware in the Alps for two hundred years. Every serious alpinist knows the name. But if you tried to buy from them online, you wouldn't have guessed it. There was no real e-commerce setup, no CRM, no paid media, no analytics. No internal team to build any of it either. The gap between what the brand is in the mountains and what it looked like online was hard to ignore. They wanted to sell direct in both EMEA and the US, and they needed someone to come in and actually build the thing.

02What I did

I took over as their CDO-as-a-Service. Built the full stack: Shopify for the store, Klaviyo for email and automation, Gorgias for support. All of it was live within weeks. Then I layered on paid media across both markets, set up the CRM flows to retain the customers those campaigns were bringing in, and wired up analytics so I could see what was actually working. One person owned the whole operation. That's how I work. When paid traffic showed which products converted best, that fed back into both ad spend and what got featured on site. When new customers came in through ads, the welcome sequences were already running. Nothing sat in a silo waiting for someone else to connect it.

03What changed

In 12 months, online revenue more than tripled. Traffic across markets grew by over 300%. The email list tripled too. The brand went from having no e-commerce operation to running one that actually reflects who they are in the mountains.