The Resolution Layer · Case Study in BriefEKOM
A national sporting-goods retailer.
A full-catalog, no-schema read across footwear, apparel, and equipment — one of a set of anonymized EKOM analyses. What surfaced, and where it leads.
Lead finding · highest-visibility
The wrong team on team merchandise.
On a team-loyal storefront, these get noticed: an Atlanta Braves tee filed under the Los Angeles Dodgers shop; a Milwaukee Bucks snapback whose bullets read "Team: Chicago Bulls"; an Indiana Fever jersey tagged Indiana Pacers; a Las Vegas Raiders hat still listing "Oakland Raiders." And every Pro Standard MLB item has a blank team field — so none appear in shop-by-team navigation at all.
Also surfaced
Products in the wrong place
A jumpsuit filed as a pant, men's shorts under women's, jacket-vests routed to "T-Shirts," and live items with no category at all — orphaned from navigation.
Contaminated & leaked copy
A softball bat carrying Air Jordan editorial copy, an internal "(HOLD)" vendor status shown to shoppers, and raw merchandising codes in live descriptions.
Attributes that break filters
A polyester jersey tagged "Denim," cycling shorts tagged "Tights," and missing sizeChartId on many items — a known driver of returns.
The SKU layer
A purchasable sneaker whose every size is flagged non-searchable, size runs pointing to the wrong parent product, and nine men's SKUs labeled "Women's Shoe."
How EKOM read it. With no schema and no manual setup, the engine profiled the catalog and ran 48 focused passes — partitioning by product family (apparel, footwear, licensed, equipment, cleats…) and, within each, by sub-type or brand — so category-specific defects like a wrong team tag or a denim attribute on a jersey surface cleanly instead of averaging away. Findings de-duplicated across passes.
From diagnosis to channel-ready. This pass read and diagnosed. The same understanding powers what follows — correcting the team tags and miscategorizations, enriching the fields that make products findable (sizeChartId, team tags, filterable attributes), running the full variant layer, and holding the line at intake so a catalog scaling under new investment stays clean.