Carhartt, an iconic American clothing company known for durable workwear and outdoor apparel, has been in business since 1889—yet its legacy has built not through adherence to tradition but rather practical, customer-driven innovation.
When founder Hamilton Carhartt first spoke with railroad engineers about their needs, he didn’t pitch them a product. He asked them where their current workwear was failing. When they told him the knees wore out too fast, he responded with double-front overalls. Later, when workers complained that hammers slipped through their loops, Carhartt’s team twisted the loops to keep the tools in place. Triple-stitched seams followed.
Today, that responsiveness to real-world challenges is guiding Carhartt’s digital evolution. In a session at SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference, Steve Kachnowski, Senior Manager of Platform Management and Global Support for Digital Engineering, explained how the company is modernizing its global commerce infrastructure with SAP Commerce Cloud to ensure its digital foundation is every bit as durable, scalable, and purpose-built as the products it sells.
Over the past five years, Carhartt has transitioned its e-commerce infrastructure from an aging, in-house platform to a globally unified, cloud-based system capable of serving both direct-to-consumer and direct-to-business channels. The company’s new commerce architecture supports 28 countries, six languages, and two currencies, all powered by a shared code base and distributed across two regional data centers.
A Single Platform for a Global, Multi-Channel Business
Carhartt’s initial move to SAP Commerce Cloud focused on its U.S. e-commerce operations. The European launch followed, bringing the entire regional footprint onto the same platform. “We have a shared code base powered in two different data centers: one for the United States and one for Europe,” Kachnowski said, noting the setup allows for central governance and flexibility while preserving regional autonomy.
The platform also underpins Carhartt’s direct-to-business (D2B) offering, Carhartt Company Gear. Designed for small and mid-sized businesses outfitting their teams in branded apparel, the D2B site is being migrated from a legacy system to SAP Commerce Cloud. It will share the same core platform but include a dedicated storefront to support embroidery, logo customization, and volume-based purchasing.
At the time of the session, the project was nearing its final development sprints, with go-live expected soon. Carhartt’s broader retail ecosystem reflects the same direction. In addition to its digital storefronts, the company operates physical retail stores across the U.S. using GK POS, further extending its investment in the SAP landscape across channels.
Across both consumer and business channels, Carhartt’s strategy has remained consistent: minimize complexity, maximize reuse, and give regional teams the tools they need without fragmenting the system. The result is a scalable ERP ecosystem that supports growth across markets and business models while allowing internal teams to operate within a common digital framework.
Meeting Demand with Built-In Flexibility
While the platform’s geographic reach is broad, its performance under pressure is just as important. Carhartt sees a significant surge in e-commerce activity during the holiday season, particularly in November and December.
In the past, accommodating those spikes required over-provisioning infrastructure for a narrow window of time. “You can’t buy dozens of servers just for five days a year,” Kachnowski said. The inefficiency of that model underscored the urgency for a more elastic solution.
The move to SAP Commerce Cloud has fundamentally changed that equation. Working with SAP, Carhartt has gained the ability to scale capacity on demand.
Behind the scenes, SAP also applied agentic AI to monitor performance indicators and flag issues before they escalated. “They were proactively monitoring our system,” Kachnowski explained. “We scaled it up, increased costs, and did what needed to be done. It was a really successful holiday season for us.”
On the operations side, Carhartt’s team has refined its deployment model to support global consistency with regional adaptability. The platform allows for staggered updates between the U.S. and Europe, though most changes are currently deployed simultaneously through rolling restarts. While the architecture supports region-specific releases, most deployments today are coordinated globally to maintain consistency and simplify testing.
Carhartt targets quarterly upgrades that are aligned with SAP’s release cadence. As the team becomes more experienced with SAP’s release cycle, it continues to refine the timing and effort required for each update.
Driving Adoption, Enabling Future Innovations
Internally, the transformation has been met with a high level of engagement from business stakeholders, who have embraced the pace of change. “They’re cutting the cake before we’ve even launched,” Kachnowski said.
Still, change management proved a formidable hurdle. “We had people who’d been doing the same thing for 10 or 15 years,” Kachnowski said. “They were experts in the system we’d been using. ‘By the way, we're pulling the rug out from underneath you. Here’s a whole new tech stack.’”
Rather than introduce change through formal instruction, new team members have learned by doing, starting with manageable tasks. The platform’s technical foundation—Angular on the front end and Java on the back end—also helped accelerate onboarding.
Carhartt prioritized out-of-the-box functionality wherever possible, adding only those third-party tools that were truly necessary. “That’s been a big part of keeping the platform maintainable,” he noted.
With the core infrastructure in place and the Company Gear migration nearing completion, Carhartt is now entering a new phase: optimizing how the business leverages the platform. This includes staying current with SAP’s quarterly feature packs and taking time to understand how new capabilities fit into day-to-day operations.
“We have a great foundation we've built. And now we can start taking a look at what Commerce is going to offer us from a software package and what we can implement from that point,” said Kachnowski.
The goal is to build something stable enough to rely on, flexible enough to adapt, and simple enough to scale. That’s durability by design, whether it’s stitched into canvas or integrated into an SAP environment.