Northwind Apparel — Personalized at every scroll
Northwind's previous storefront treated 1.2 million products like a static catalog. We rebuilt it on a vector-backed personalization layer where every PDP, every recommendation, every piece of copy is generated for the individual shopper — without losing the brand's editorial voice.
This brand is illustrative — not a paying client. The architecture, stack, and approach below are the real playbook we'd use to ship this engagement. Named-client case studies replace these as paying engagements ship.
What we walked into.
1.2M SKUs across 14 markets, hundreds of merchandiser-curated edits per week, and a stack that couldn't personalize without nuking page-speed scores. The CTO needed a storefront that felt bespoke to each shopper while staying SEO-pristine and Lighthouse-green.
How we built it.
- 01
Migrated the catalog to a vector index (Pinecone) with hybrid keyword + semantic ranking for every search query
- 02
Wrote a personalization service that re-ranks PDP recommendations on each request using session intent and a long-lived shopper embedding
- 03
Trained a fine-tuned model to draft on-brand product copy, with merchandiser approval queues to protect tone
- 04
Re-architected the storefront on Next.js App Router with streaming RSC for sub-100 ms TTFB at the edge
- 05
Built an editorial AI co-pilot that lets merchandisers spin up curated drops in minutes instead of days
What changed for the business.
+34% lift in average order value within 60 days of launch
Conversion rate up 28% on personalized PDPs vs. control
Product copy production scaled from 200/week to 4,000/week with the same team
Time to first byte reduced from 740 ms to 82 ms
Built with.
"We expected a website. They handed us a sales engineer that never sleeps. Within two months the personalization layer alone paid for the build."
Have a project in mind? Let's talk.
Tell us what you're building. We'll come back with a concrete plan, timeline, and price — and an honest take on where AI gives you the most leverage.
- Free 30-min discovery call
- Concrete roadmap & pricing within 48 hours
- No NDA needed for the first chat
Typical response time: under 4 hours.