From four integration tools to one platform

About Sea to Summit

Sea to Summit is an Australian brand that designs outdoor and adventure equipment – sleeping bags, tents, camp kitchen gear, and gear for hiking, water sports, bikepacking, and trekking. Headquartered in Perth, Western Australia, the company sells through outdoor retailers worldwide.

For most of its history, Sea to Summit sold exclusively B2B through independent regional distributors that each carried the brand in their own market. That began to change as Sea to Summit acquired several of those distributors outright and then, as demand surged, launched its first direct-to-consumer channel, starting in North America and expanding into APAC and EMEA on a single global Shopify Plus deployment.

Today, Sea to Summit runs both DTC and B2B in every region, with largely region-specific commerce stacks. In Australia, the company also operates a separate distribution business with sole distribution rights for more than 25 other outdoor brands, layered on top of its own DTC and wholesale operations.

Challenge

As Sea to Summit acquired distributors, each brought its own ERP, EDI vendors, and bespoke approaches to solving the same operational problems. “Every region had found its own answer to the same problems,” Ryan Anderson, digital & ecommerce development manager, said. “But none of those answers could talk to each other. And critically, we had no consistent way to measure how well any of them were actually performing.” That growth left them managing several disconnected ERPs across its regions.

Internally, Sea to Summit had built its own solution to connect the additional ERPs, the company’s digital asset management system, its ecommerce channels, and its PLM system. However, the solution was dependent on custom code, and the logic was understood by only a small number of people. This made it extremely difficult for new developers and analysts to get up to speed and was not sustainable long-term. “We realized that we’d really created our own black box,” Anderson said. The upkeep was a real drain, too. Two engineers each spent roughly half a day every week, about 400 hours a year combined, on keep-the-lights-on work for the legacy infrastructure.

That fragility showed up first in order handling. When an order failed to reach an ERP, the alert landed in Anderson’s team inbox regardless of the cause. “If one order failed to get into an ERP, it would take one to two business days before we could investigate, go through logs, and debug it,” Anderson said. With so little visibility into what the integrations were doing, the business had no easy way to confirm whether a price or inventory count was accurate, a question that came up daily.

The cost of running EDI the old way was adding up, too. The acquisitions had left Sea to Summit with multiple VANs and providers across three regions, with each retail EDI connection carrying a significant annual maintenance cost. In North America, the third-party middleware inherited through an acquisition, which the team used for EDI and channel connections including Shopify, was a persistent friction point, which the team found slow to support, opaque, and difficult to extend.

As Sea to Summit brought on new trading partners and online marketplace programs, including dropship programs with major US retailers, brand-advocacy marketplaces, and Amazon in Australia, the team needed an integration foundation it could trust to scale with the business, not another black box to maintain.

Solution

Sea to Summit initially brought on Celigo to solve a handful of immediate priorities, among them a NetSuite integration, but the team quickly recognized EDI as one of the platform’s biggest opportunities—given how many regions, VANs, and providers it was already juggling.

To maximize this opportunity, Sea to Summit also added Celigo B2B Manager for EDI, which allowed the company to bring its B2B retail trading partners onto the same platform. B2B Manager enabled them to implement a simple new rule: every time a legacy EDI connection came up for renewal, or a new partner needed onboarding, it would go through Celigo B2B Manager. Before Celigo, each legacy EDI stand-up carried a significant cost. With Celigo, folding that work into B2B Manager meant simpler commercials, fewer vendors and contracts to manage, and room for more trading partners without added headcount or overhead.

Because Celigo’s B2B Manager is on the same platform as application integrations and can be self-serviced, the rollout moved quickly. The Celigo platform handled the connectivity to those trading partners and gave the team agency to monitor and manage their own EDI transactions. The team stood up EDI connections for an Amazon cost-inventory program in about two weeks, and brought three North America retail trading partners fully live in under a month. Overall, EDI flows were running in production within five months—built by the Sea to Summit team with light external advisory support. In all, Celigo has now replaced four integration tools. New channels, including Amazon EDI, went straight onto Celigo with no new tools or custom builds.

That speed came from a bigger shift. Celigo gave every region a common, well-documented way of building integrations; one that people across the team, not just two developers, could understand. This eliminated the tribal-knowledge bottleneck and let teams reuse the same proven architecture instead of building each ERP connection from scratch. Order sync for North America, EMEA, and APAC, which used to run on separate tools in each region, now runs on Celigo. Today, the team operates 8 integrations and 40+ flows across all three regions from a single platform, with plenty of headroom left.

That paid off directly one morning, when a North America inventory sync—still running through their legacy middleware—failed just ahead of the company’s biggest campaign weekend of the year. Because the same inventory-sync pattern was already live in EMEA and APAC, the team was able to replicate that architecture and stand up the North America connection on Celigo that same business day, cutting the legacy middleware out of the flow entirely. “A six-figure campaign weekend was basically safeguarded and protected thanks to being able to pivot so quickly to Celigo,” Anderson said.

The same approach carried over when the company migrated its recently acquired Nordics distribution business onto Celigo, including a niche EDI connection its finance team had never supported before. When the Nordics business changed ERPs, order transmission from key EDI partners held at 100% after launch, with no disruption to trading.

Results

Anderson sums up what the platform has meant for Sea to Summit in six words: “money back, time back, agency back.”

• Money back. Consolidating fragmented EDI vendor contracts onto Celigo simplified commercials and freed up budget the team can put toward growth instead of maintenance. Retiring those four legacy tools offset the large majority of the Celigo investment, before counting the new capabilities added on top.

  That growth has come without added risk. Integration volume has climbed nearly 18x in just over a year, with success rates staying at or near 100% throughout, including during its November-December seasonal peak. “Feeling our middleware creak under peak-season pressure made us uneasy in previous years,” he said. “Migrating all our order integrations to Celigo in January and February let us go into this next peak season with confidence instead of dread.”

• Time back. Anderson noted that his team has been able to reduce code within nearly every process by 99%, including one fulfillment routine that used to require roughly 14,000 lines of code and now runs on a single 149-line Celigo script. “When a new team member jumps in to look at a fulfillment routine, they now start at 149 lines of code, which fits on even a laptop screen,” Anderson said. “It’s that kind of healthiness to the integration layer that allows us to operate a lot more sustainably.” The difference shows up in how fast problems get solved and how little upkeep the integrations need: maintenance time has dropped about 87%, from around 400 hours a year of ad hoc upkeep for two engineers to roughly an hour a week as a scheduled check, and order-import errors that once took one to two business days to resolve now resolve in under 15 minutes.

  Even hidden manual work disappeared. A routine operations audit found an employee spending 125 hours a year manually re-keying Amazon marketplace orders into the ERP twice a day and, because the connections already existed in Celigo, the team was able to build and ship an automation within days. More than 700 Amazon direct-fulfillment orders a month now reach the ERP in real time instead of once a day, and an automated Amazon inventory feed corrected hundreds of SKUs, replacing a manual upload and closing the availability gap. “There’s so much opportunity to create efficiencies across the business with Celigo once you start investigating,” Anderson said.

• Agency back. Eliminating the developer dependency from order-import errors didn’t just save Sea to Summit valuable time. With Celigo’s visibility and notifications in place, the customer service team can now see, diagnose, and fix a routine order error directly in Shopify, eliminating developer involvement for these failures. Some teams have gone two quarters without logging an escalation ticket.

Anderson has also seen important impacts on his team’s development and on cross-functional collaboration. “We have a very good technical team that doesn’t want to be spending their days sifting through debug logs or updating package managers anymore,” Anderson said. “I’ve seen them grow to become valuable technical analysts, and the broader business now seeks them out to help problem-solve. I just see total engagement in what’s going on, total transparency, and it’s really a fantastic thing to see.”

Looking Ahead

Fourteen months after onboarding, Anderson sums up the engagement simply: “The biggest success I can think of with Celigo is that within 14 months, we’ve had significant commercial, financial, and EDI compliance flows running across the three major regions we operate in. It’s quite remarkable.”

Looking ahead, Sea to Summit plans to keep extending the same playbook: replicating proven integration patterns across every region and adding new EDI trading partners as it grows into its platform headroom. The team is also starting to use Celigo Ora, the platform’s natural language AI interface, for reporting, and is exploring AI-assisted monitoring of integration health. “We’re thrilled to have Celigo in our toolkit,” Anderson said. “Change in business is inevitable, but with Celigo, we can embrace that change. There’s so much more opportunity for us and now we have the tool to do it.”