How MEC lets multiple teams run one website without losing its brand
Summary
- MEC is a leading Canadian outdoor retailer that helps people of every level get outside, whether they're camping, cycling, climbing, or cross-country skiing.
- Merchandising, marketing, and operations all work on a website that both educates and sells, and they need to move quickly without every change going through developers.
- On Prismic, each team builds and updates its own pages from shared, developer-built components, so MEC gets to market faster and keeps a consistent look across the site.
The challenge: one website, many teams, and no time to wait
MEC's website isn't only a store. It's where a beginner figures out what to bring on a first camping trip and where an experienced backpacker compares the lightest gear for a portage. It's also where someone commuting to work finds the right waterproof jacket.
“It's not a blog where you're just educating customers. You're guiding them to the right gear. Education and sales go hand in hand.”
That means many teams have a stake in the site. Digital merchandising runs the homepage and banners. Marketing runs contests, giveaways, and store events. Customer care flags information that confuses shoppers. Teresa works with all of them to keep the site accurate and running smoothly.
On a more rigid setup, all of that work would pile up with a small team.
“If I was the main person handling it, or me and one developer, putting everything on the site, we'd have to handle the weekly content refreshes, ad hoc page creations, and address issues that arise. There are so many parts of the site, and they'd all have to go through that one small team.”
Teresa has seen that on other platforms.
“They were a lot more restrictive. This is how the homepage looks, this is how the product listing page looks, this is how a content page or a blog page looks. For anything else, you need a developer to help you update it.”
The solution: shared components that every team can build with
When Teresa joined MEC, the flexibility of Prismic surprised her.
“It's so quick. You can come in and do what you need without relying on other people.”
Here's what makes it work for MEC:
Teams own their pages. Merchandising, marketing, and operations each build and update the pages they're responsible for. Nobody has to wait for a developer to create a new page, and teams aren't limited to a handful of page templates.
Developers set the design. MEC's developers build the components, the reusable page sections that define the look and feel. Every team then builds pages from those same components.
“Digital merchandising and marketing can build their own pages, and it still looks consistent, without one person having to check if every page follows brand styling.”
Everyday updates are quick. “The updates themselves are very intuitive. It's drag and drop, it's an upload,” Teresa says. On a busy campaign, the time goes into the number of pages, not the work on each one.
50 coupon messages updated in one pass: Cart messages that would have been edited one by one went through the Prismic MCP server in a single job. That kind of work used to wait on a developer, and now the team runs it themselves.
That setup matters even more now. MEC is in the middle of a site redesign. Developers are building the new components, and every team will then build with them.
“Nothing is more jarring than landing on a page that looks completely different from the rest of the site. You wonder if it's broken.”
The results: faster changes and a consistent brand as the site grows
- Faster time to market: Teams publish campaigns and updates themselves, so MEC can act quickly on new initiatives.
- Fixes go live immediately: No other teams need to be involved. “This morning I saw a page was a bit outdated and needed an extra brand exclusion. I updated it, pushed it live, and that was it,” Teresa says.
- A consistent brand across every team's pages: Shared components keep the site looking like one site, however many teams are publishing and however fast they move.
“The flexibility allows for speed. Autonomy is one of the biggest impacts, because it lets the business act fast on any initiative.”
Bonus tip from MEC
If several teams share one website, pick a setup that lets each of them work on their own while developers stay in charge of how things look. That's what lets a large retailer move quickly without the site drifting off brand.