Houdini is a technical outdoor brand with progressive performance design, headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, built around a mission to design desirable, regenerative solutions for outdoor living. The business runs with a head office team of around 30 people and annual turnover of around SEK 260 million, with Sweden as its core market, followed by Norway, and a fast-growing presence in China and Japan. In January, Linn Thor joined as head of ecommerce two days after Houdini's previous technology partner went out of business, inheriting both a platform problem and a mandate to turn the brand's website from a branding showcase into a growth engine.
Within three months of board approval, Houdini relaunched on Shopify, working with Nordic implementation partner Iggy Agency. The business beat both its budget and the previous year's sales, despite having just four days live before its summer sale.
- Moved from board approval to launch in around three months, run by a five-person team with no dedicated technical staff
- Lifted conversion rate 88% and revenue 40% in its first full quarter live, July to September, compared with the same months a year earlier
- Cut Thor's weekly sales reporting from most of a working day in her previous role to well under an hour, using Sidekick
The challenge: a site built for show
Houdini had been outgrowing its own website for a while before a crisis forced the issue. A new CEO had arrived about a year before Thor, with a mandate to build a stronger business around the brand. When Thor joined, alongside a new marketing director, her brief was to commercialise the site and drive online growth. The team has since set out a clear priority for the site.
"The Houdini e-com is not only a shop," Thor says. "It is Houdini's owned platform for purchase, education, and relationship building. Its main purpose is to turn owned demand into revenue, and secondly to turn our customers into a long-term community."
That ambition met a harder deadline when Houdini's technology partner went out of business two days before Thor started. The warning signs had been there for a while. "I knew they'd had discussions about a platform change maybe two years before," she says, "but when this happened, it really was a necessary move to do."
The stakes were higher than a standard replatform. Houdini runs its ecommerce with a five-person team and no dedicated technical staff, a setup that only works if the platform underneath it stays out of the way. A composable or headless rebuild, the kind of project Thor had seen consume teams elsewhere, risked trading one dependency on an outside partner for another.
The solution: one platform a lean team could run
Houdini weighed Centra, the Stockholm-founded headless commerce platform used by many Nordic fashion brands, against Shopify. Thor had worked with larger, more technical setups before, and she knew what a five-person team without dedicated developers could take on and what it could not.
It was super important for me to create a foundation where my small team could work with the business rather than driving development projects, which easily happens when you do a more headless commerce site.
Houdini chose Iggy Agency as its implementation partner on a recommendation from its Shopify account contact, and the two sides agreed on a deliberately narrow scope from day one: migrate the existing site as is, with no redesign. Thor credits that discipline with keeping a three-month timeline intact. "They are one of the best project leaders I've ever worked with, super structured," she says of Iggy. "In a project like this, it's easy to drift and start thinking, 'While we're at it, shouldn't we redo more?' The more teams you bring in, the greater the risk that the project grows bigger than intended. It was really good to have someone who could remind us: if we want to reach this deadline, we should do what we said we'd do in the beginning."
The migration ran roughly two and a half to three months, from board approval in mid-March to launch in mid-June. The one real complication was connecting Shopify to Houdini's Business Central ERP system, which pushed the launch back a week and left just four days live before the brand's summer sale.
The result: less maintenance, more time to sell
The compressed timeline turned out not to matter. Houdini beat its budget through that first, four-day-old summer sale, and the strong start held: across its first full quarter back online, from July to September, conversion rose 88% and revenue rose 40% compared with the same months a year earlier. Thor reports the platform has also been markedly easier for the whole team to manage since. Features that would have taken three to six months to build on the old setup, like shop-the-look product pages and native-language storefronts, were simply available to switch on.
Sidekick has become part of how the team works day to day, not just during the migration. When a customer flagged a product incorrectly charging a shipping fee, Thor asked Sidekick to diagnose it rather than opening a support ticket. "It found the problem and asked if I wanted it to fix it. I said yes, and it was done," she says. "That would normally have been five back-and-forths with a tech partner." It has also reshaped her own reporting work. At her previous company, a weekly sales and returns review took considerably longer, since the data had to be gathered from many different sources. At Houdini, she builds the same kind of review with Sidekick in well under an hour, visual breakdowns included. The team now spends the rest of the week acting on what it finds instead of compiling it.
Shop Pay's one-click checkout was new to Houdini, introduced with the migration despite some internal hesitation over its button colour clashing with brand guidelines. It has found real, if uneven, adoption since launch: 18% of transactions overall, rising to a majority of orders from shoppers in the United States and Canada, markets without a single dominant local alternative the way Klarna dominates in the Nordics. Thor has not yet run a formal analysis linking Shop Pay to the broader lift in conversion, so the two are kept separate here. The team has also used Shopify's native translation tools to localise the storefront for English and German shoppers, revisiting some older German product copy after customer feedback flagged it as unclear.
It's such a big win when you can work with your store and really drive conversion, rather than focusing on new development projects.
Looking ahead, Houdini is weighing a dedicated expansion store for China, Japan, and South Korea, markets it currently reaches mostly through wholesale and local distribution. An expansion store would make those markets more efficient to manage, with everything run from one place. Closer to home, the team has already taken the next step, connecting Claude to Shopify and to other web-based tools such as Figma, Asana, Microsoft 365, and Zendesk. That has made a significant difference to its processes and day-to-day tasks, and the team is moving much faster than it did before. For Thor, this is only a first step. "I know there's much more to explore, and I'm looking forward to seeing what this team can achieve with the efficiency gains we're now seeing."