Managing the delivery of a headless BigCommerce storefront, WordPress content platform, and Salesforce OMS integration for a bone health supplement leader — driving 190% revenue growth year-over-year.
AlgaeCal is a Vancouver-based health supplement company that sells the only calcium supplement in the world clinically supported to increase bone density — not just slow its loss. Their plant-based calcium, derived from organic marine algae, is backed by clinical studies from institutions including UCLA Health, Harvard Medical School, and Georgetown University.
With over 114 employees across four continents and approximately $15 million in annual revenue, AlgaeCal operates both direct-to-consumer and B2B channels. Their flagship Bone Builder Pack comes with a lifetime guarantee: show measurable bone density improvement on your DEXA scan or get a full refund. It's a bold promise — and it requires a digital infrastructure that can match the ambition of the brand.
AlgaeCal came to Northern Commerce because their existing digital ecosystem couldn't keep pace with their growth. They needed a unified commerce platform, a content engine that could convert educational traffic into customers, and an order management system that would let their customer service team operate entirely within Salesforce.
AlgaeCal's digital presence was split across multiple systems that didn't talk to each other. The commerce platform, content site, subscription management, marketing automation, and customer service tools all operated in silos. Customer service representatives had to juggle multiple applications to process a single order or manage a subscription — slowing response times and increasing the risk of errors.
The project required three major workstreams delivered in parallel: a headless BigCommerce storefront that could serve both D2C and B2B customers from a single platform, a WordPress content site that could turn thousands of educational articles into a commerce funnel, and a custom Salesforce integration that would let the entire customer service operation run from one screen.
Each workstream had its own complexity. The BigCommerce build needed to support subscription and one-time purchase flows on the same product pages, with regional pricing and cart customization across multiple markets. The WordPress site had to maintain a library of thousands of SEO-optimized articles across 13+ content categories while feeding traffic into the commerce experience. And the Salesforce integration required custom middleware that could handle order processing, returns, subscription management, and secure on-behalf purchases — all in real time.
As Project Manager at Northern Commerce, I owned the delivery of all three workstreams — coordinating between developers, designers, the AlgaeCal team, and third-party integration partners to ship a platform that worked as a unified whole, not a collection of disconnected pieces.
The hardest part of this project wasn't any single platform — it was making six platforms behave as one. A customer could discover AlgaeCal through a WordPress blog article, click through to the BigCommerce storefront, subscribe to the Bone Builder Pack through Ordergroove, have their order managed in Salesforce, receive marketing follow-ups through Maropost, and process payment through PCI Pal — and at no point should any of those handoffs feel like a handoff.
The custom Symfony middleware was the linchpin. It sat between BigCommerce and Salesforce, translating commerce events into CRM actions in real time. When a customer placed an order, the middleware pushed it to Salesforce immediately. When a CSR processed a return in Salesforce, the middleware reflected it back in BigCommerce. Subscription changes in Ordergroove flowed through the same pipeline. The result was a single source of truth for every customer interaction — something AlgaeCal's service team had never had before.
Managing this required tight coordination across multiple development teams and vendor partners, clear API contracts, and a testing strategy that validated not just individual integrations but end-to-end customer journeys across the full stack.
The project wasn't about building one platform — it was about making six platforms work as one. Every customer touchpoint, from blog article to subscription renewal, had to feel seamless.
The unified platform delivered a 190% increase in revenue year-over-year. Customer service representatives went from juggling multiple applications to operating entirely within Salesforce — processing orders, managing subscriptions, handling returns, and completing on-behalf purchases from a single screen. Load times improved across the storefront, and AlgaeCal's marketing team gained the ability to publish commerce-ready content pages independently through the Shogun CMS library.
The WordPress content platform continued to scale as a growth engine, with thousands of SEO-optimized articles driving organic traffic into the commerce funnel. The B2B channel launched with automated vendor approvals through BundleB2B, opening a new revenue stream that operated alongside the D2C storefront without added operational complexity.
For me, AlgaeCal was a project that reinforced what I believe about great project management: it's not about managing tasks — it's about managing the spaces between systems, teams, and decisions. The complexity wasn't in any single platform. It was in making sure that when a customer moved from a blog post to a product page to a subscription to a support call, nothing broke and nothing was lost.