The situation
What we were solving When I got to Foot Locker, the company ran eight retail brands. Foot Locker, Eastbay, Lady Foot Locker, Kids Foot Locker and the rest were all bolted onto a homegrown ecommerce platform built and run out of the Eastbay facility in Wisconsin. My job was to make sure the front end stayed clean and consistent, while optimizing the conversion funnel and user engagement.
How to replace the platform under eight live stores without breaking anything?
We didn't try to move all eight at once. That would have been a mess. Instead we built a layer in the middle called FLAPI, the Foot Locker API, that sat between the old system and the new one. With that in place, each brand could move to Magento on its own schedule. We built one cart and checkout that worked the same way underneath, then reskinned it for each store as it came online.
So the team kept shipping while the platform changed underneath them, and customers never saw the seams. They shopped their brand and checked out on their brand, same as always. What changed was everything we could do once all eight ran on the same foundation.
The work
Polaris pulled the eight brands into one cart.
Once brands were moving to Magento, we started a project called Polaris. The idea was to let someone shop across all eight brands and check out once. You could have a pair of Foot Locker sneakers, an Eastbay basketball and a Kids Foot Locker order in the same cart, with each line showing which brand it came from so nothing got confusing.
Polaris also fed the new FLX loyalty program, so points and perks followed the customer everywhere instead of getting stranded on one site.
Polaris · shopping flows
