Rotate° is a technology studio from London, focused on crafting beautiful, brand-led eCommerce experiences that not only delight customers but drive measurable growth for some pretty cool brands.
Over the past year, they've been focused on scaling their capabilities, especially around personalisation, seamless customer journeys, and integrating and extending powerful, flexible platforms like yours truly, to deliver composable eCommerce experiences for these clients.
We've collaborated on some exciting projects together, such as Chilly's, Tracksmith, and Wild, where Rotate° helped them navigate complex eCommerce challenges as they scale, whilst also elevating their digital presence.
So we sat down Chris, Chief Experience Officer at Rotate°, to dive into a casual chat about our relationship, their approach to eCommerce, what's critical to consider when building eCommerce experiences, and how they work with DatoCMS to create some truly remarkable and memorable online eCommerce experiences for household brands like the Big Green Egg and Wild.
Going composable in eCommerce
What have you noticed as crucial elements in a successful eCommerce implementation?
One of the biggest opportunities we focus on is that the most successful eCommerce implementations start with a clear, customer-first approach. You’ve got to really dig into the current customer journey — understand their touch points, pain points, and behaviours. This is informed by data, whether that’s behavioural (using tools like Hotjar, Contentsquare, MS Clarity) or event-based (GA4, Segment), and also attitudinal (user testing, post-purchase surveys).
With a clear picture of the current and target customer journey, we can start to build out an Information Architecture and UX/UI to deliver on this.
Flexibility and future-proofing are also key; building something scalable that can adapt to new customer needs or market shifts is crucial. This has been particularly pertinent in the past 12 months with the economic backdrop, where brands are looking to maximise their engineering time as best as possible. We are spending more time designing the admin experience with scalability and future-proofing front of mind, to ensure the tools don’t become bloated and complicated which will effect admin performance over the long term.
Finally, collaboration between design, development, and content teams is also fundamental. Aligning all stakeholders early and ensuring there’s a clear communication pipeline makes the entire project smoother, faster, and more aligned with business goals.
We consistently aim to get new features into the hands of end users (both consumers and admins) for quick feedback and iterate solutions as required.
Repeatedly working with DatoCMS
As a long-time partner , we’ve collaborated on many projects. What are some of the reasons for this working?
For us at Rotate°, flexibility and performance are crucial, and DatoCMS really excels in both areas. One key consideration is scalability—DatoCMS can grow alongside our clients’ ambitions, and that’s a big win for us when dealing with high-expectation eCommerce brands from a front-end experience perspective. Each of our clients’ sites are unique to them, and we need technology to enable that.
For our clients, content is a critical element in crafting the shopping experience and Dato allows for that product decoration to happen in a seamless fashion, via an intuitive interface.
The speed at which DatoCMS operates, also plays a pivotal role in delivering fast, smooth experiences for admin users, which is exactly what our clients demand.
Let’s cover some of the considerations when working with the CMS, and what other tools do you see us playing nicely with usually?
When we were working on the new website for Wild, the decision to use DatoCMS stemmed from its flexibility and its ability to work seamlessly in a composable architecture. We were looking to expand the stack to include a composable CMS to allow for greater content control of key areas of the front-end such as the subscription builder flow.
Wild also leverages Recharge for customer subscription management, where a few experience functions integrate with DatoCMS well.
For Tracksmith, we needed a platform that could handle their content-heavy approach while delivering performance. Tracksmith had a specific need to configure rich storytelling at the product-level, and required a content model which could support that.
Other tools in their stack included Shopify for commerce, Algolia for Search & Merchandising, and Klaviyo for email marketing automation. Similarly Tracksmith have managed to leverage DatoCMS as a pseudo PIM for management of their product catalogue.
And what feedback do you and your customers typically have on the end results?
The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Clients love the intuitive nature of DatoCMS – its user-friendly interface makes it easy for their teams to manage content independently, without having to rely on developers for every little change.
They also appreciate the speed at which the platform operates; faster load times, combined with the flexibility to scale, really make a noticeable difference in the customer experience.
DatoCMS strikes the balance between flexibility and ease of use perfectly. It’s a rare combination, and it’s a big part of why we are huge fans of DatoCMS.
One of the standout features for us is DatoCMS’s modular content approach. The ability to build content blocks that can be easily reused or repurposed across multiple pages or landing pages for marketing campaigns gives our clients so much flexibility without requiring any technical intervention. Particularly with our bespoke designed sites where brand consistency is critical. Today, we have shifted from designing sites page by page to a more modular approach that uses flexible yet consistent Design Systems to deliver true brand-led experiences. Dato massively compliments this approach when it comes to the build.
Also, the webhook integrations are incredibly smooth — they allow us to trigger updates across various parts of the stack effortlessly.
Another positive for us is the collaboration with your support team; they’re always quick to respond and work closely with us to ensure our projects run smoothly. It’s that partnership that really elevates DatoCMS in our eyes.
The Headless CMS for eCommerce
Let’s focus on eCommerce, what are some standout reasons that make us an ideal CMS for you?
In eCommerce, especially with the level of sophistication our clients expect, flexibility is key. DatoCMS’s headless architecture gives us the ability to structure content exactly how we need it, ensuring seamless integration with other parts of the stack, like Shopify, Recharge, or Brightpearl.
For us, the key aspects of DatoCMS which are beneficial to our client projects include:
Content flexibility - Dato allows you to design content structures tailored to all business. Instead of rigid, predefined content types, you can design dynamic, modular blocks that can be reused across various pages or components.
Scalability - Dato has an infrastructure that supports growing businesses by providing a global CDN, efficient API's and flexible pricing
API versatility - Dato allows precise data fetching via GraphQL/REST, enabling seamless integration with any frontend or service.
Localisation - Dato supports localisation and internationalisation by allowing multi-language content, region-specific content models, and easy management of translations, enabling global eCommerce merchants to serve diverse markets effectively.
Integrations and extensibility - Dato excels in integrations and extensibility through its powerful API, webhooks, and plugin system, allowing seamless connections with third-party tools and custom functionalities tailored to business needs.
Its multilingual and multi-regional capabilities also stand out, especially for brands like Tracksmith that have a global audience. And because DatoCMS is API-first, it allows our developers to easily pull in content across platforms while keeping things centralised, which streamlines the entire workflow.
Tracksmith is a good example of how we have used DatoCMS to deliver high-performance, high-impact eCommerce experiences. For Tracksmith, storytelling is at the core of their brand, and with DatoCMS, we were able to create a content management flow that allowed them to deliver rich, engaging stories alongside product. Each product page tells a story and Tracksmith can create this at scale across all lines of product within collections.
Similarly, Tracksmith have the capabilities to curate landing pages for Event and Journal content to showcase their experiential arm of the brand, where they foster a community both on and offline.
Check out some of the work that Rotate° have been building with DatoCMS. If you're looking to build up or replatform a composable commerce project of your own, let's chat!