Moving 686's custom outerwear store onto Shopify

686 makes technical snowboard outerwear: shell and insulated jackets, pants and bibs, gloves, base layers and its SMARTY 3-in-1 systems. Riders shop it by spec, so how waterproof and how warm a jacket is matters as much as the color.

Its store ran on a custom platform with a long feature list: a kit builder, shoppable lookbooks, a style guide, tech pages for each fabric, filters for waterproofing, warmth and fit, rider profiles tied to products and a global retailer locator, plus connections to its inventory and order system, payments and fraud screening. An SEO audit of that site found thousands of pages with no meta description or H1, and category URLs that buried the keywords several folders deep.

DYODE started by writing down everything the old site did, so the move to Shopify could be checked feature by feature instead of from memory, and set up the catalog data before building pages.

Alongside the build we worked as 686's E-Commerce consultants: the SEO audit and its fix list for category pages, a channel plan covering email, paid search, Facebook, retargeting and affiliates, and a promotion calendar for its affiliate partners.

We set up the catalog so shoppers can filter jackets and pants by collection, waterproof rating, warmth and fit, as they could on the old site, with color swatches that drive both the filters and the product pages. Sizes that sell out show as greyed-out boxes instead of vanishing.

We built grid templates for the team rider and technology pages so 686's own staff could fill them in, added the GORE-TEX detail lightbox, replaced the tech charts, set up back-in-stock emails, and restyled the order emails so confirmations, receipts and shipping updates match.

We mapped every old category URL to its new Shopify collection so existing links landed on the right page. The Pepperjam, AdRoll, Google Ads, Google Analytics and Facebook pixels went in before launch, and we tested orders and transactions end to end.

After launch we worked on page speed: collection and recommendation images were resized, and CSS and JavaScript were minified and combined where Shopify allowed it.

686 left its custom platform for Shopify with the things riders shop by still in place: waterproof, warmth and fit filters, tech detail, and product pages that show which sizes are left.

Its team got templates for the pages it changes most, redirects for its old URLs, and a written plan for search, email, paid and affiliate channels. 686 still sells on the Shopify store DYODE launched.