A Seattle outdoor gear brand · $140K → $820K MRR.

This archetype is a slice of Seattle outdoor DTC we ship into reliably. Picture a hardgoods, technical apparel, or backpacking-essentials brand working out of Ballard, Capitol Hill, or Fremont. It sits at $140K MRR: 60 percent direct, 40 percent through 12-15 PNW specialty dealers. Its customers are REI-trained and quick to return gear that misses. Its product cycles follow the spring shoulder, summer peak, and fall PNW shoulder.

The pre-engagement state looks like this. $140K MRR on Shopify Standard. No dealer-network B2B portal, so orders arrive by PDF and email. A refund-default returns policy. Klaviyo flows that ignore seasonality. No exchange-first option anywhere.

Three structural problems compounded the revenue ceiling. First, returns ran 18 percent of revenue on the refund-default policy. Every refund killed the original margin, and the customer often never bought a replacement.

Second, dealer orders came in by PDF and email, and a sales rep keyed each one into Shopify Admin. That bottleneck capped dealer onboarding at 2 new stores per quarter. Third, the email program treated December the same as June: no seasonality, no shoulder-season campaign timing, no PNW-specific weather triggers.

Workstream 1 · Shopify Plus migration with SEO preservation. The migration started with a theme export, a URL inventory, a top-200 ranking export, and a full 301 redirect map. That protected the PNW outdoor-keyword cluster: alpine, climbing, Cascadia, backcountry. Post-launch organic dipped 3 percent in week 1 and recovered to baseline by week 4.

Workstream 2 · Exchange-first returns flow. We re-architected the returns flow so exchange is the default option. The return path offers "swap size" or "swap color" first, with refund as the bottom-of-funnel option. A custom integration with Loop Returns runs the workflow. Margin recovery reached 22 percent because exchange preserved the original sale.

Workstream 3 · Dealer-network B2B portal. Dealers got self-serve ordering through Shopify Plus B2B plus a NuORDER integration for the dealer-channel B2B catalog. Each account carries per-account pricing, NET-30 terms, and dropship-from-warehouse fulfillment. Dealer count moved from 12 to 30 in 12 months.

Workstream 4 · Seasonal Klaviyo flows. We built shoulder-season campaign templates: spring backpacking, summer alpine, fall layering, winter backcountry. PNW weather triggers do the rest. A rain forecast fires the shell-and-rain campaign; snowfall fires the ski-and-snow campaign. Email revenue moved from 8 percent to 29 percent.

Workstream 5 · Warranty-registration + community program. A lifetime-warranty registration program ties into a community Slack and a monthly trip-report newsletter. The warranty keeps customers in orbit between purchases. Repeat-purchase rate moved from 19 percent to 36 percent.

This is one of our most-shipped engagement shapes in Seattle. The fit: outdoor DTC in hardgoods or technical apparel, $100K-$300K MRR, a mix of direct and dealer revenue, a returns rate above 15 percent, no warranty program, and no seasonal email cadence. Sound like your brand? Then the playbook transfers.

The 16-week timeline holds steady. The workstreams compress or expand in the same proportions. Metrics typically land within plus or minus 25 percent of the archetype numbers.

Five capabilities transfer directly: Shopify Plus migration with PNW-keyword SEO preservation, exchange-first returns flow with Loop Returns, dealer-network B2B portal with NuORDER, seasonal Klaviyo + weather-trigger flows, and warranty-registration + community program. Every Seattle engagement starts with a 30-minute discovery call. We work Pacific Time, with same-day response Monday to Friday 9 to 6.