Outdoor brand for indoor kids.

Northwave had a catalogue of genuinely good product and a visual identity that felt borrowed from every other outdoor brand. The buyer knew the product was real; the brand wasn't giving them credit for it.

The engagement covered a full identity rebuild and a new e-commerce surface — product detail, collection, cart — on a custom headless stack.

We reframed the voice away from mountain-summit imagery and toward the honest use case: a city resident, a weekend, a bag that survives both. The copy stopped performing toughness and started being specific about materials, warranty, and the actual conditions the gear was built for.

On the build, we replaced a heavy templated storefront with a custom Next.js front-end pulling from a headless commerce back-end. Product detail pages got editorial treatment — scrolling copy, inline detail crops, long-form notes on sourcing — without sacrificing the purchase path.

We shipped in seasonal drops so the creative team could keep feeding the site at a cadence that matched the product calendar, instead of treating the site launch as a one-time event.

E-commerce conversion rate lifted three point two times against the prior year, average order value up thirty-four percent, and a brand the in-house team now develops forward without needing external creative per drop.