Housser.is

John Housser, Digital Architect

Arc'teryx Equipment

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Working with Arc’teryx for 12 years was an incredible journey, from building pure brand websites, to a global ecommerce platform processing hundreds of millions of dollars annually in gross revenue.

Roles

  • Web Architect
  • Manager, Web Development
  • Sr. Web Developer
  • Web Software Developer
  • Web Production Designer

Key Projects

Veilance - 2009

Our first foray into ecommerce was with the launch of the specialty fasion sub-brand Veilance in 2009. We extended our custom web application to add commerce functionality. This allowed for efficient aligmnet with our custom Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform.

AWS Migration

Starting in 2017 and building on the success of the Mountain Conditions Reporting platform, we began moving the constellation of systems that supported arcteryx.com from bare-metal servers to the Amazon Web Services public cloud. As the lead architect for this project I worked closely with the software development team to facilitate the refactoring that was required to leverage the cloud ecosystem.

Micro-Frontend Distributed Web App / Headless CMS

In order to support a growing complexity and variety of backend integrations, improve the stability and performance for our customers, and reduce the effort and risk in our development processes, we began splitting our web application into a multitude of micro frontends beginning in late 2018. We began with the splintering of the homepage, implementing an application gateway to act as a composer for the user-facing experience, a Content Management System to act in a headless capacity to join the existing source systems. This pattern allowed us to begin building small and focused web applications for specific experiences. Those new web applications could be built using the technologies best suited for that experience with total independence, and could source the data required for their experience from the suitable upstream services as needed (CMS, ERP, CRM, etc.).

SAP & Magento 2 Migration Roadmap

As we started to see our existing systems and integrations limiting our capacity and flexibiltiy, we began to explore the options that we could assemble to create the next iteration of the system landscape to support the evolution of Arc’teryx into a consumer-focused brand continuing to grow at such an exciting pace. As the Web Architect, I have been working with architects across the brand and larger enterprise to coordinate foundational system evolutions. The core enterprise team has a roadmap to replace the existing (custom) Enterprise Resource Planning platform with SAP. I have developed a vision, philosophy, and roadmap to evolve the ecommerce ecosystem to leverage these new enterprise systems so that we can provide innovative and engaging digital experiences for our connected consumers. This ecommerce system landscape includes the micro-fronend approach described above, Magento 2 as a headless ecommerce platform enabling omnichannel experiences and coordination, Drupal as a headless CMS powering customer-facing content, and upstream integrations with core enterprise systems (PIM, ERP, CRM).

Technology of Note