The Resolution Layer · Case Study in BriefEKOM
A national outdoor retailer.
A second-pass, no-schema read of the catalog — one of a set of anonymized EKOM analyses. What surfaced, and where it leads.
Lead finding · present but wrong
Women's products tagged male — across the whole assortment.
Every one of 1,132 items whose title or collection reads women's, ladies', or girls' carries a literal male gender value. It isn't visible on any single record — only when the records are read together. One load-time default replicated across every SKU that passed through the same process, so the products are in stock, correctly named, and invisible to the gender filters, campaigns, and recommendations built for the buyers they were made for.
Also surfaced
Stored encoding corruption
2,816 descriptions carry corrupted characters where a trademark or symbol should be — valid in the source file, still wrong on the page.
Fulfillment blockers
~1,030 in-stock items carry zero weight and dimensions, so checkout can't compute a shipping rate — buyable until the cart tries to price it.
Wrong & leaked content
Descriptions copied from a sibling product, mismatched color and style values, and internal staging codes surfaced as customer-facing titles.
Feed vs. catalog, settled
Each format item was checked against the raw source — separating a genuine catalog defect from an export artifact, so the fix lands in the right place.
How EKOM read it. With no schema and no manual setup, the engine profiled the catalog, partitioned it by product type, and recursively re-split the one oversized bucket on its own best sub-field — 25 passes, each sized to see its slice in full — then validated every feed/format finding against the raw source file. The method was chosen from the data, not configured by hand.
From diagnosis to channel-ready. This pass read and diagnosed. The same structural understanding powers what follows — systematic re-tagging, filling the merchandising gaps, and holding the line at intake so the next load-time default can't replicate silently across the catalog. Diagnosis is step one of the arc; enrichment is where it turns into recoverable demand.