ØLÅF’s e-commerce lead on building structure inside a fast-moving fashion brand

ØLÅF’s e-commerce lead Nol Oosterom isn’t your typical fashion operator. Before joining the Amsterdam-based brand, he spent a decade running a development agency. That background gave him a sharp technical eye and a clear sense of what slows companies down.

In early 2025, he stepped into ØLÅF with a simple but ambitious goal: to bring structure, speed, and ownership to a fast-growing brand with global ambitions.

We had a chat with Nol to understand how he’s helping ØLÅF scale without losing its creative edge and what he’s learned from switching sides.

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Nol, you joined ØLÅF just a few months ago. What was your first impression?

Coming in from a development background, it was a shift. The culture was very creative. Beautiful work, strong brand, but no real digital system behind it. Even the annual calendar lived in Figma, not the project management tool.

So my first month was all about creating structure. I started by gathering and centralizing data: images, sales, operational info. I introduced concepts like “single source of truth.” Not as jargon, but as practical tools. If you don’t build a foundation, things start to break. You get slow decisions, missing files, bad forecasting.

What were the first changes you made?

Ownership. We took control of our digital assets. That meant DNS, Trustpilot APIs, servers, everything that had been fragmented across agencies. It sounds simple, but many brands don’t own their own domain.

When you’re growing, this stuff matters. If a domain is held by an agency and they go bankrupt, or just stop answering the phone, you’re stuck. You can’t run a business like that.

What made ØLÅF decide it was time to bring someone like you on board?

I’ve known Olaf, the founder, for years. I built his first Shopify site eight years ago. So there was mutual trust. He knew that technical leadership had to be more than just running a webshop. Tech touches every part of the company: merchandising, advertising, operations.

He gave me the freedom to shape it, as long as it served the brand.

So what’s the current tech stack?

We’re on Shopify, with Gorgias for support and Klaviyo for email. All standard. But the stack wasn’t the problem. It was the way data was handled.

When I joined, people were copying Shopify numbers into Excel. That doesn’t help creative teams make decisions.

We centralized everything into Supabase, an open-source database, and connected it to Looker Studio for visualization. Now we can track things like: when we run a Klaviyo campaign, does it lead to more support tickets? Or: what’s our sell-through rate at full price versus sale?

What’s your main success metric?

Sell-through at full price. In the Dutch market, sale culture is huge. But margin lives in full-price weeks. If I have 100 t-shirts, I don’t want to sell 80 of them in July clearance.

Conversion rate is a close second. It tells us whether the traffic we’re bringing in is actually relevant.

And third: support experience. Fast, accurate responses help conversion and loyalty. We’re even looking at training a GPT-like model on our support data to automate this better.

How do you prioritize the roadmap?

I split it by effort and impact. Something like fixing B2B flows requires cross-team coordination. That’s high effort. But changing how we brief agencies or improving product info is low effort and high impact. Those go first.

I also call customers directly. When we wanted to improve NPS, I rang 20 people who had submitted tickets. That’s how we found the returns phone number was buried in a block of text. Easy fix, but we would not have seen it in a survey.

Any specific wins so far?

We restructured the product listing page by season. Just added simple labels. Click-throughs to product pages went up 30 percent. Small change, big result.

And on email, we’re testing post-purchase flows that go beyond order confirmations. Tips on garment care, brand voice, loyalty nudges. It’s often the most overlooked part of the journey.

With such a lean team, how do you scale?

It’s just me and one colleague on e-commerce. I work with expert agencies but always keep ownership. I handle the platform, the data, and the strategy. Agencies handle execution, like Klaviyo flows or Snapchat ads.

And I’m selective. Our paid ads agency only works in fashion. That means they understand things like sell-through pressure and seasonality. Same with tech. No custom builds unless we absolutely need them.

Composable tools, proven systems, clean setup. That’s the approach.

Final lesson?

Know your strengths. Fill the rest with the right partners. And don’t start with the biggest project. Start where the impact is high and the friction is low.