Fun with: Footwear (Merrell)
I’ve been “accepting” VP Ecommerce roles for an hour, and inviting y’all to take these jobs with me. Our role this week? VP, Ecommerce @ Merrell (Wolverine Worldwide).
🥾Let's kick it.
Merrell’s full-year 2024 revenue was approximately $598 million out of WWW's total reported revenue of $1.76 billion — making it roughly a third of the company. WWW owns many other brands too (Saucony, Wolverine, Harley‑Davidson Footwear, and more) … important later, so hold that thought.
At Merrell’s scale, the site should be a growth engine, but familiar cracks show up fast: brand and product storytelling is absent, navigation and discovery is awkward, attach motions don't exist, and checkout has friction. Each has an obvious fix — building out storytelling and journeys, optimizing attach and checkout.
Perhaps this is where we should start.
But... the first questions we might want to ask: why do these issues persist, and - are there systemic reasons why they have not been fixed?
🚧Maybe it's Merrell's platform
Merrell runs on Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC). Perhaps the decision to build on SFCC made sense at the time, but it’s likely holding them back from optimizing at the pace of their peers. Salesforce may make some enterprise integrations and governance easier, but at the expense of speed and flexibility. Shopify, by contrast, has leaned into a different philosophy. As Tobi Lütke (Shopify founder and CEO) explains in this ACQ2 interview, it’s about “lifting the floor” — making it difficult to deliver a subpar baseline — while also “keeping the ceiling high” so ambitious teams can still push the edges.
That framing helps explain why things like merchandising and content agility, checkout extensibility, and experimentation velocity may conceivably feel harder here. Not impossible — just harder, and perhaps the juice is not worth the squeeze at current DTC channel share.
And that’s what makes the real question worth asking: is it better to keep building on Salesforce, or to consider the cost–benefit of replatforming?
First, let's make sure our hypothesis is correct - that platform constraints vs lack of basic ecommerce strategy and execution are to blame here.
Our next step is a cost–benefit analysis:
💰 We model the upside of replatforming — faster merchandising, more flexible checkout, quicker testing over time, personalization, rich ecosystem. And assess the it’s impact on traffic, conversion rates, AOV, and LTV.
🩹 We weigh the true cost — not just licensing and migration, but the disruption of unwinding Salesforce’s ties to CRM, loyalty, order management, ERP, and analytics. Replatforming takes courage, conviction, and needs a time horizon beyond next few quarters. Easier for PE portcos vs public companies like WWW.
📈 We extend the cost / benefit — apply this same evaluation across Wolverine Worldwide’s broader portfolio (Saucony, Wolverine, Harley‑Davidson Footwear, and others).
Let's fix Merrell first, since is the biggest division, and this is the job we accepted. But let’s also treat it as the proof point for a platform strategy that can flex across all of WWW, delivering both economies of scale and the performance each brand needs to blaze its own path.
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⚒️See how we crushed other VP Ecommerce jobs at Stanley and Trupanion
