How Mervin Moved Three Snowboard Brands to One Shopify Plus Store

Mervin's riders were already buying across all three brands. SwiftOtter helped Mervin move from an Adobe Commerce multi-store infrastructure to a single Shopify Plus store with three custom headless storefronts, a shared cart and checkout, and a design for each brand built to showcase the gear. All three launched together in 15 weeks, ahead of snowboard season.

Mervin Manufacturing: boards built by hand in the USA since 1977

Mervin Manufacturing builds snowboards in Carlsborg, Washington, and has since 1977. It's the last major board factory in the USA. Every board comes off the same factory floor, built with the same eco-minded approach and Mervin's own technology, like Magne-Traction edges and its banana and camber profiles.

Mervin sells that work under three brands, each with its own personality. Lib Tech is the technical flagship that keeps pushing the limits of what a board can do. GNU pioneered asymmetrical boards and has a rawer, skate-influenced attitude. Bent Metal makes precision bindings. Mervin sells direct to riders in the US, Canada, the UK, and Europe and through a network of specialty dealers, and many riders pair a board from one brand with bindings from another.

Why Mervin migrated off Adobe ahead of snowboard season

For years, all three brands ran on an Adobe Commerce multi-store infrastructure, with separate WordPress sites for the blogs. That setup handled a lot of complexity, but by early 2026, keeping it updated and secure had become a growing cost for the small web team. Their Adobe Commerce version was reaching end of life in August, and staying put meant paying for a major upgrade just to keep the lights on.

The sites themselves had fallen behind, too. They hadn't been redesigned in about ten years, and they didn't do justice to the boards.

Then there was the calendar. New winter boards go live in late summer, and Mervin's busiest selling season starts in September. By the time the project kicked off in mid-May, that left about three months to design, build, and launch three brands at once, with Mervin's ERP, tax, shipping, email, pro pricing program, and four international markets all working on day one. Launching late would have meant cutting over in the middle of peak season. Waiting would have meant paying for an upgrade to Adobe Commerce and renewing a contract.

Choosing between BigCommerce and Shopify for a multi-brand store

Mervin's team came to us evaluating BigCommerce and Shopify, and both had real strengths. BigCommerce's multi-storefront feature can run several branded sites from one backend without going headless. Shopify offered an existing connector for BlueCherry, the ERP that runs Mervin's product and inventory data, and Shopify Plus gave access to Shopify Functions for the custom promotion logic Mervin relies on.

SwiftOtter has worked in Adobe Commerce since 2012 and builds on both BigCommerce and Shopify, so we walked Mervin through the trade-offs of each platform. Once Mervin chose Shopify, the bigger question was how to structure three brands on it.

One Shopify Plus store with three headless Hydrogen storefronts

Mervin had three realistic ways to run three brands on Shopify.

Three separate Shopify stores. Each brand would get its own store and theme. That's simpler to start, but it meant three ERP connections, three sets of apps, no shared cart or customer accounts, and duplicate inventory for any Bent Metal product sold on the Lib Tech or GNU sites. It would also have multiplied app, integration, and licensing costs.

Expansion stores on one Plus account. Shopify's team confirmed expansion stores wouldn't fit Mervin's branding requirements for three distinct brands.

One Shopify Plus store with three headless storefronts. One catalog, one ERP connection, one checkout, and shared customer accounts across all three brands, with a custom front end for each brand built on Shopify Hydrogen. The trade-off is a bigger upfront build, since headless storefronts don't come with a theme store and content tools out of the box.

We priced the options side by side so Mervin's leadership could weigh cost, timeline, and long-term fit. Mervin chose the single store with three headless storefronts, the option we recommended for where the business is headed.

A custom storefront design for each snowboard brand

Because each storefront is built from scratch on Hydrogen, every brand got a design and shopping experience shaped around its own identity rather than a shared theme with a new logo. The design team worked from Mervin's latest catalogs and style guides. Lib Tech moved to a darker, sharper look that lets its board graphics stand out, GNU went brighter and sleeker, and Bent Metal leans into its signature red.

The shopping experience was built for how riders actually pick gear. Product pages put the boards front and center, with a full image lightbox and recommended bindings right under the add to cart button. Mervin's Board Finder came over too, walking riders through a few questions and pointing them to the boards that fit how and where they ride. A brand switcher in the header lets riders move between Lib Tech, GNU, and Bent Metal without losing their cart, and location detection sends each shopper to the right market and currency. Bent Metal is built right into the board shopping experience too, with a "complete your setup" feature in the main navigation that points riders straight to bindings.

Behind the scenes, Mervin's team builds and edits pages in Payload, a drag-and-drop editor that lives inside the Shopify admin and uses the same building blocks shoppers see on the live sites, from featured category grids to full-width video. Products and content are finally managed in one place, and the WordPress blogs are gone.

Launching three brands in 15 weeks without putting sales at risk

The project ran in three phases. First, two working sessions with Mervin's team mapped how orders, money, inventory, and integrations needed to flow. Next came design, starting with Lib Tech and setting the foundation for the other two brands. Then development and testing ran across all three storefronts at once, with AI-assisted development helping the team keep pace and every change still going through code review, QA, and Mervin's own testing.

The hardest stretch came near the end, when the ERP, email, and tax integrations each needed extra work from their vendors. Rather than cut over with open issues, the team moved launch by two weeks and resolved them first. Mervin's Magento store stayed ready as a fallback until the new sites were live.

Results of Mervin's Shopify Plus migration

Lib Tech, GNU, and Bent Metal went live together on August 27, 2026, 15 weeks after kickoff and ahead of the fall rush. Mervin left the Adobe ecosystem without paying for another upgrade, all three brands got their first redesign in a decade.

Mervin went straight into an ongoing partnership with SwiftOtter. Next up is bringing Bent Metal binding recommendations onto Lib Tech's product listing and product pages, building on the cross-brand selling that one shared store already makes possible.