CQL Acquires Riess Group: Read the Press Release
CQL Acquires Riess Group: Read the Press Release
As one of the world’s most recognized fashion footwear and accessories companies, ALDO Group, home to ALDO, Call It Spring, and Sperry, has built its reputation on craftsmanship, style, and accessibility. With a global retail footprint spanning over 1,500 stores and a rapidly growing ecommerce business, ALDO Group set out to modernize its digital ecosystem to support a new era of unified commerce. Their goals were clear: build a scalable foundation for growth, streamline operations, and empower brand teams to move faster, all while maintaining each brand’s unique identity and creative expression.
To achieve this, ALDO Group partnered with CQL, a Shopify Plus Platinum Partner, to lead a phased digital transformation beginning with ALDO as the flagship implementation, followed by Sperry and Call It Spring. Together, the teams conducted a platform evaluation and total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis, confirming that Shopify’s enterprise-grade SaaS architecture would provide the agility, scalability, and operational efficiency needed to power ALDO Group’s family of brands.
In less than nine months, ALDO Group and CQL rebuilt the entire ecommerce stack end to end, spanning UX, front end, back end, and product management. The engagement included a robust Figma-based design system, AI-powered search and discovery through Bloomreach, and deep integrations across OMS, CRM, loyalty, CPS, and ERP systems. The result is a multi-brand Shopify framework that accelerates time to market, enhances brand autonomy, and lays the foundation for conversational and contextual commerce experiences across channels.
The immediate results for the business were encouraging:
ALDO Group is a leading global fashion retailer known for its footwear and accessories that blend style, quality, and accessibility. Founded in Montreal, the company operates more than 1,500 stores worldwide and continues to shape the future of fashion with a focus on creativity, craftsmanship, and sustainability.
ALDO Group sought to modernize its digital ecosystem to streamline operations, empower brand teams, and accelerate time-to-market across its global portfolio. Partnering with CQL, the team conducted a comprehensive platform evaluation and total cost of ownership analysis to validate Shopify’s capabilities and ROI.
A digital transformation to Shopify enabled ALDO Group to unify its brands on a single, scalable platform to streamline operations and accelerate time-to-market. The retailer’s flexible multi-brand framework, modern tech stack, and dynamic design system powers growth, creativity, and long-term efficiency across its global commerce ecosystem.
A new design system foundation was driven by ALDO Group’s internal UX and engineering teams, who built a scalable Figma library and the Style Dictionary token infrastructure that bridges design and code. ALDO Group’s shared design library unified visual components, typography, and content blocks across ALDO, Call It Spring, and Sperry, while still allowing each brand to maintain its distinct identity.
As Shopify experts and UX/UI consultants, CQL collaborated with ALDO Group throughout the co-development process by reviewing key page designs and advising on Shopify best practices, implementation feasibility, and scope considerations. This partnership helped ensure designs could be executed efficiently on Shopify while supporting ALDO Group’s design system goals, accelerating development workflows, enabling rapid iteration, and maintaining cohesive multi-brand experiences.
To enhance product discovery and personalization, ALDO Group integrated Bloomreach Discovery, leveraging AI-powered search and merchandising to deliver faster, more relevant shopping experiences. CQL used its internal Search Accelerator framework to customize the integration and connect key systems efficiently. The result was a powerful enterprise-level solution that reduced manual merchandising tasks, improved product findability, and enabled real-time personalization across the shopping journey.
The success of the replatform was fueled by a close and dynamic co-development model between engineers from ALDO Group and CQL, supported by active collaboration with Shopify’s merchant success and solutions teams. This joint approach ensured that ALDO Group’s internal developers, product owners, and QA teams gained hands-on experience throughout the build. By launch, the teams were fully equipped to manage content, deploy enhancements, and operate their digital ecosystem independently, marking a new era of tech simplicity and brand autonomy for ALDO Group.
“Our newly launched Shopify-powered experiences mark a new stage in ALDO Group’s digital journey: accelerating unified commerce, laying the foundation for conversational and contextual experiences, and speeding up time-to-market for new services across channels. This transformation was made possible through an efficient design-to-code process, a close co-development between ALDO Group and CQL, and strong collaboration with our partners at Shopify.”
Gregoire Baret
ALDO Group
