evo started in 2001 as evogear.com, operating out of founder and CEO Bryce Phillips's garage in Seattle. Twenty-five years later, evo is a global outdoor and experiences company that sells more than gear. Today, it operates 12 retail stores across the US and Canada, eight Rhythm Japan resort locations, evo Hotels in Salt Lake City, Hakuba, and Tahoe City, adventure travel through evoTrips, All Together Skatepark locations in Seattle and Salt Lake City, and in-store services, rentals, and events.
For two decades, evo’s commerce operations ran on a platform the company built and maintained in-house. This legacy platform carried the company from a garage to a global leader in action sports. The team was spending most of its time maintaining systems instead of building what came next. So evo rebuilt its foundation on Shopify with Shopify partner eHouse, moving its direct-to-consumer storefront first, bringing its stores onto Shopify POS right behind it, and setting up one platform to carry the whole evo experience.
With Shopify, evo has:
- Migrated more than 20 years of custom-built commerce, roughly 250 brands, and about 3.5 million SKUs onto one platform in 14 months
- Moved a massive, complex online storefront to Shopify with just eight minutes of downtime, then beat plan during its first major sale weeks later
- Generated roughly $120,000 from more than 6,000 AI assistant storefront visits in a recent 30-day period
- Freed an engineering team that had spent about 60% of its time maintaining the old stack to focus on building evo's connected ecosystem across retail, travel, service, and hospitality
- Processed over half of online orders through Shop Pay from the start
The challenge: evo outgrew its legacy system
Two decades of building from scratch
Ben Plehal, VP of technology at evo, has spent 23 years at the company. He likes to tell people he has a grown-up job at a toy store. He leads everything in technology.
Sometimes I say it's everything with a power cord or a line of code.
His job covers traditional IT, infrastructure, and help desk, as well as all of product engineering and software development. For most of evo's history, the team built what it needed in-house, and that engineering expertise was a competitive advantage. The custom platform was fast, its SEO was best-in-class, and its faceted navigation let enthusiasts filter down to the exact ski waist width and length they wanted.
evo's technology became more complex as the business expanded beyond retail.
Maintenance was crowding out the future
Every part of evo's business ran on the custom stack, and most of the hard work happened behind the scenes. Adding a payment method took months. So did integrating a membership platform. A tax integration ran four to five months and went over budget, and a loyalty integration took six. evo's team is small and talented, but more and more of its time went to maintenance instead of new ideas.
Nobody shops at evo because of our tax integrations or because we're PCI compliant.
Looking ahead, evo had a five-year strategy built around what the team calls its ecosystem: bringing customers into the brand for more than a single ski purchase.
That vision included more than the gear. It included expert advice, service, travel, lodging, and even rental skis waiting in an evo hotel room. But evo was spending most of its engineering time on transactions instead of building that experience. As engineering costs climbed and the company's ambitions grew, maintaining a custom platform no longer made long-term sense.
People don't buy skis to have skis. They buy skis to go skiing.
Choosing to move off the platform he had spent two decades building was not a small decision for Ben. He had been along for the entire ride of that platform, and built much of it himself before leading the teams that extended it.
Retiring 20 years of his team's work came with real mixed feelings. But he was more excited about where it would free the team to go. For two decades, evo's engineers had worked behind the scenes, reconciling taxes and keeping transactions flowing into the ERP. Shopify was an opportunity to bring them closer to customers and the rest of the business.
The solution: rebuilding the foundation on Shopify
Lowering the total cost of ownership
evo framed the move around cost, but not mainly software licenses. The bigger number was opportunity cost: the time and engineering that went into building and maintaining everything in-house, year after year. The team spent about 60% of its time maintaining the old system and 40% on forward progress, and even that 40% often went to plumbing customers would never notice.
We needed to lower the total cost of ownership, especially the opportunity cost of ownership, because we couldn't keep paying that tax of custom building everything.
The custom stack carried a second cost: fragmentation. evo's retail and online had grown up as separate systems, and the team spent much of its time connecting them behind the scenes. evo wanted one consistent foundation across every channel, so the business could run on the same platform instead of a patchwork the team had to hold together.
Choosing a platform instead of building one
Every new capability came with the same problem. Whether it was a loyalty program, gifting platform, or another tool, the build estimate was always substantial.
We wanted to bring in these best-in-class Lego bricks. With off-the-shelf platforms, and especially the app ecosystem around Shopify, we could try out all this amazing software being built out in the world without having to do a custom integration every time.
evo spent two to three years looking for the right fit. At first the team leaned toward a headless, composable approach and was a little dismissive of Shopify. Then it kept hearing about the cost and complexity of maintaining headless infrastructure, and it sounded familiar.
It sounded like exactly what we were trying to get away from.
By the time evo was ready to decide, Shopify was the front-runner. The customization in Liquid meant evo could show up as evo rather than as a generic store. The app ecosystem gave the team ready-made tools without a custom integration every time.
Shopify Markets meant one store could serve the global business, and Shopify POS could bring the same platform into evo's stores. Even higher variant limits counted. evo got its start selling used and discounted gear, and re-commerce is still a growth frontier for the team. Used products add six condition variants to every size and color, causing SKU counts to grow quickly. The new platform had to handle that complexity.
For the build, evo chose eHouse from several Shopify partners. Their team was comfortable managing evo's complexity, from multiple vendors and hundreds of thousands of active SKUs to inventory spread across warehouses and stores and a thicket of shipping rules. evo also brought on a dedicated project manager, Gary Penn of consultancy Chameleon, to own and drive the timeline and keep the project on track.
Migrating 20 years and millions of SKUs in 14 months
The heaviest part of the project was the cleanup. eHouse ran a deep discovery phase first, coming to Seattle, walking the stores, and going through every part of the business. It worked like moving house and opening every box in the garage to decide what was worth bringing along. Two decades of custom work had left thousands of one-off behaviors the team called zombies: compatibility rules, add-ons, products with their own tax and shipping rules. For each one, the team worked out why it existed, whether it still earned its place, and how to handle it on Shopify, as a native feature, a third-party app, or a changed business requirement.
We essentially did that 200,000 times. They kept popping up, like, oh yeah, we do this weird thing in the Seattle store only.
Some calls were easy. Others were not, because people had grown attached to how the old system worked.
Change is hard for people, and people loved the old couch.
evo's team handled the architecture-heavy work, including integrating its custom-built PIM with Shopify and designing transaction and inventory flows between Shopify and NetSuite. eHouse's integration platform handled the data flowing between systems. The data migration was a project in its own right. Because the catalog turns over almost entirely each season, the team imported about 3.5 million SKUs, and that was only five years of history. Start to finish, it took 14 months from signing eHouse to online launch.
All of this happened while the existing store kept running, which Ben likened to building a new airplane while still flying the old one. evo ran the existing stack through the 2025 holiday season while finishing the new storefront, so it could launch during the year's slowest stretch. The team considered launching in Canada first, since it accounts for a small share of the business, but running two storefronts side by side turned out to be nearly all the work for a couple of percent of revenue. Instead, evo moved its direct-to-consumer storefront in a single cutover, then started rolling out Shopify POS store-by-store. Canada runs on the same Shopify store through Shopify Markets, so one store serves both countries.
The results
A clean launch and a sale that beat plan
On launch night, evo's team, eHouse, and Gary got on a video call and made the DNS switch. About eight minutes later, the new evo.com was live. Within three or four minutes, an order came through: a customer in California bought two pairs of sunglasses. The team sent him a note letting him know he was customer number one.
The big stuff worked from minute one.
The first real test came days later with evo's Memorial Day sale, its biggest spring event and the team's first time flipping themes, setting up badges, and merchandising the site on the new platform. evo beat plan, and the executive team felt confident calling the launch a success.
evo planned this as a long-term move, not a quick spike. The team kept its old shipping setup at launch rather than change too much at once. Now evo can test. Using A/B testing, the team can now experiment with shipping and checkout and improve from there. The new foundation pays off in smaller ways too. When the team wanted to swap in a new service, the app ecosystem turned what had been a months-long custom project into a two-week one.
It was about a two-week project to light up that new service. Against the custom platform, it would have been months in the making.
Search that knows a skier from a snowboarder
Navigation was a real strength of the old site, and evo wanted to keep the faceted filtering its enthusiasts relied on. Search was the piece the team most wanted to improve, so it looked for a specialized tool to add personalization on top.
evo brought in Constructor, a machine-learning search and product discovery platform, rather than the token-matching approach of older search tools. With about 250 brands on the site and very different customers, the same search can mean two different things.
A skier shopping for goggles is going to make very different decisions than a snowboarder. Constructor watches the behavior patterns on the site, so it might surface Smith goggles to a skier and Anon goggles to someone showing snowboard shopping behavior. That discoverability is how people find product among the hundreds of thousands we carry.
Constructor proved its value before evo committed. During the sales process, it ran its search results alongside evo's existing search on the live site, allowing the team to compare the two side by side. That personalization now powers both search results and product recommendations.
Shop Pay adoption and reporting in more hands
Shop Pay accounted for over half of online orders from the start, an upgrade over the old login, password, and payment experience.
The bigger surprise was who started using the platform. evo's controller began running her own reports in the Shopify admin, leaning on Sidekick, Shopify's AI assistant, to uncover opportunities and analyze data, then passed the word to the director of finance. On the old stack, evo had no finance dashboards at all, and building equivalent reports in its data warehouse could take days or longer.
A lot of that is now way more self-service, where it used to take an engineering ticket.
As word spreads, Ben keeps giving people admin access with one piece of advice: if you do not know how to do something, ask Sidekick.
A new sales channel evo barely had to build
evo also started getting orders it did almost nothing to earn. Shoppers were arriving from AI assistants and buying. In a recent 30-day window, evo earned roughly $120,000 from more than 6,000 AI assistant storefront visits, through ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Shop. Those AI-driven orders traced back to a decision made during the migration. evo mapped its products cleanly to Shopify's native categories and category metafields, so they carried the data AI tools need to show the right product. Protecting discoverability had been one of Ben's top project risks, both the SEO evo was known for and its readiness for AI-driven discovery. On the old stack, the same readiness would have meant a hand-built semantic schema across the catalog, and a custom project evo would have had to staff and maintain it.
It's cool that that's just a sales channel now. We just checked the box and it's on.
This is exactly the reason evo moved. When a new channel emerges, whether it's AI assistants or something else, the team can turn it on instead of building it from scratch.
One platform, from online to the stores
evo’s stores are central to the brand, and Shopify POS is the next phase. After piloting at the Seattle flagship, evo expanded the rollout across their US stores, with Canada following.
The rollout has given evo a cleaner cash wrap, more flexible tablet-based hardware not tied to a fixed register, and staff training that is easier to run. The team is moving store by store, dialing in each location’s hardware before the next one goes live. Bringing North America onto one commerce platform ties evo’s online and in-store business together. Japan’s resort-based locations, which have no ecommerce sales, sit outside this work for now.
This all comes back to the ecosystem evo is building, and the team building it. On one platform, evo can recognize a customer across the journey, from buying skis online, to an avalanche clinic in a store, to an evo Trip in Japan, to a mountain bike tune-up back home, and make it all feel like one relationship. And the engineers who spent two decades keeping a custom system running can finally focus on the customer.
I'm particularly excited about engineering being closer to the customer. Getting these super talented engineers out in front of the curtain, understanding what customers need, working closer with the business, I'm excited about what we can go get.