Custom licensed apparel · Live commerce platform
ActiveFifteen years of platform debt, cleared in the order we argue for: stabilise, remediate, re-architect — then AI.
Problem
CollegeWear has made custom graduation stoles and officially licensed campus apparel since 2010, serving students, organisations and universities nationwide across two platforms — direct retail and institutional partners. A made-to-order configurator generates data continuously: every design a customer starts creates records and assets, whether or not the order is ever completed. Fifteen years of that, against a traffic peak concentrated into graduation season, is a demanding foundation to run a business on.
What we’re doing
A phased engagement that follows exactly the sequence we argue for everywhere else on this page.
First, stabilise — controlled deployment, staging parity, and a validated rollback path, so no change reaches production without a way back.
Second, remediate the data — governed archival with historical records preserved, and automated cleanup so the platform stops accumulating what it will never use again.
Third, re-architect — isolated environments per platform, metric-driven auto-scaling for seasonal peaks, in-memory caching, and asynchronous ERP processing so a customer's checkout never waits on an external system.
The data and AI layer comes after that foundation is sound. Not before it.