Elevate Outdoor Collective creates websites 75% faster with a headless CMS

Before Contentstack, Elevate Outdoor Collective used a homegrown CMS and Demandware to manage eight websites across the organization. Aside from many of the functional challenges of utilizing separate CMSes, one of the gravest problems Elevate Outdoor Collective experienced with the Demandware platform was the development requirements. Demandware is highly technical. Developers without specialized training often struggled to build and maintain the system.

As a result, the development team spent a lot of time hacking the system to get it to work the way they needed — and the marketing team was utterly reliant on developers to make any content changes. Additionally, when Salesforce acquired Demandware (renamed to SFCC), the increased costs became too expensive to justify the benefits. Elevate Outdoor Collective determined they needed a more cost-effective, feature-rich and developer and marketer-friendly CMS.

Josh Harris, senior front-end engineer, evaluated various CMS vendors before choosing Contentstack headless CMS.

“Contentstack is far superior to the competition," Harris said. "It is clearer to understand and has better documentation. While testing the competitors’ demos, we found that they were cumbersome to use.”

One drawback to Demandware was that it didn’t support local development. Elevate Outdoor Collective had to work in externally staged sandboxes, which slowed development significantly. Contentstack’s multi-environment feature made building, structuring data, and managing content more straightforward and faster. Developers at Elevate Outdoor Collective can readily build in staging — or any other environment they set up — before committing to production.

In Demandware, activities as simple as updating a link required developer support and half a day to complete, in Contentstack, it takes 10 minutes.

“Since migrating to Contentstack, updating content has gotten 90% faster; furthermore, it has allowed Elevate Outdoor Collective to launch eight websites in less than six months,” said Nicole Fugere, director of Web Services.

Here are more ways in which Contentstack has helped Elevate Outdoor Collective:

• Contentstack CMS is so intuitive it took no time to train Elevate Outdoor Collective's marketers. They can now independently build landing pages and update content without a developer’s help.
• Contentstack CMS is flexible and doesn’t require a specialized developer to maintain it, which has freed up developers to focus on more critical projects.
• Contentstack’s extensible APIs allowed Elevate Outdoor Collective to automate processes like updating product size charts and build integrations that are highly unique to their technology stack. As a result, Elevate Outdoor Collective has reduced manual process errors and can adopt best-in-breed technologies that best fit their business needs.