Enterprise Retail ยท Team Leadership
The Bay
Running content engineering and day-to-day site production for a bilingual, 24/7 e-commerce flagship, from the front end to the team behind it.
Hudson's Bay Company, founded in 1670, filed for bankruptcy protection in March 2025 and wound down its retail operations that spring, closing after 355 years in business, around the time my tenure there ended. Its trademarks and domains, including thebay.com and labaie.com, were later sold to Canadian Tire, so there's no live site to link to here.
Screenshots shown for portfolio purposes only, to illustrate work performed during employment. Product and brand names are trademarks of their respective owners; this page is not affiliated with or endorsed by Hudson's Bay Company or Canadian Tire.
The challenge
Hudson's Bay Company ran The Bay and its French-language counterpart, La Baie, as one bilingual e-commerce operation, live 24/7 across international markets on Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Eleven years there meant growing from hands-on front-end production into leading the content engineering team behind it: the people, the platform standards, and the systems that kept two language versions of a major retail site in sync without ever going down.
My role
What I actually did
- Team leadership. Built, hired and mentored a content engineering team, and put in place the feedback systems and workflow changes that shortened ramp-up time and made the team more productive.
- Platform management. Directed global website production and content operations on Salesforce Commerce Cloud, supporting 24/7 e-commerce and marketing across international markets in both English and French.
- On-call reliability. Sat on the on-call rotation to catch and resolve issues before they hit traffic, the part of keeping a 24/7 platform stable that happens outside business hours.
- Development standards. Set the rules for code quality, accessibility (WCAG) and site performance that let a site this size index reliably and load fast, and partnered with UX and engineering on new capabilities like custom Salesforce page templates.
- Campaign delivery. Ran large-scale campaign launches and day-to-day site operations, and improved JavaScript rendering, crawlability and technical architecture as the platform grew.
- Search and AI readiness. Aligned content structure and technical foundations with AEO/GEO principles, and introduced AI-assisted workflows to make the SEO and content operations team faster and more scalable.
- Data-informed strategy. Guided the roadmap with A/B testing and analytics rather than opinion, balancing proactive feature work against day-to-day business needs while still hitting deadlines.
Outcome
Eleven years at Hudson's Bay Company: seven as Senior Web Producer, the last four leading the content engineering team, running The Bay and La Baie side by side on the same platform without downtime. It's the clearest proof of the other half of this work: not just building a site, but running one, and the team behind it, at a scale most freelancers never see.
Questions
About this project
What does a content engineering manager do at a large retailer?
Runs the systems and the people behind a site that can't go down. That means platform standards, accessibility and performance benchmarks, large-scale campaign launches, and a team that has to hit deadlines on a 24/7 international e-commerce operation. It's less about writing any single page and more about making sure a large team can publish correctly, every day, in more than one language, without breaking the site.