Highline

Building an Outdoor Operating System

A partnership to engineer a unified hospitality platform, from the ground up.

Services

Platform Development, Strategic Consulting

Client

Craftsbury Outdoor Center

A Paradise for Athletes

The Craftsbury Outdoor Center's mission is to support and promote participation and excellence in lifelong sports, with a focus on rowing, cross-country skiing, biathlon, and running, while also emphasizing sustainable practices and stewardship of the surrounding land, lake, and trails.

The Challenge

Disconnected Systems Were Creating Operational Friction

Craftsbury's operations were fragmented across multiple, disconnected software systems for membership, ticketing, lodging, programming, range management, lessons, and equipment rentals. This siloed approach created significant challenges:

Intensive manual work for staff, who had to reconcile data between systems.
Difficult for members and guests to easily sign up for programming, lessons and membership
A lack of unified data, which made it impossible for management to get a clear, real-time view of the business.

What we did

Building an Outdoor Operating System

Our goal was to co-create a single, centralized platform that would serve as the "source of truth" for Craftsbury, while providing our Guests and Members with a world class Digital Experience. This bespoke system, initially codenamed "Marge," was designed to unify every facet of the business from Food Service to Yoga Classes. The success and power of this custom solution ultimately led to its evolution into the scalable OutdoorOS platform.

Implementation Breakdown

A Phased Approach from Discovery to Deployment

Phase 1: Discovery & Collaborative Mapping: We initiated the project with intensive, on-site workshops involving every Craftsbury department to map existing workflows and identify critical pain points.
Phase 2: Engineering: Our team developed foundational modules starting with a Centralized Membership system that extended to: Programming, Lessons, Range Management, Fitness Classes, Reservations and a Unified Calendar
Phase 3: Deployed to 80 users and 4000 guests using a phased approach allowing the community to gradually adopt to the new technology. This was a significant effort given a diverse group of users from 8 to 80.

Solution Highlights

A Flexible Architecture Designed for Real-World Use

A Modular, Unified Architecture: We designed the platform not as a single, monolithic program, but as a series of interconnected modules. This allows different parts of the business—like retail and rentals—to communicate seamlessly while also allowing for future components to be added easily.
Guest-Centric and Staff-Centric Interfaces: The solution focused on two key users. For guests, we built intuitive self-service features for booking and payments. For staff, we designed clean, efficient workflow that simplified complex daily tasks.

Results & Impact

A Foundation for Operational Clarity and Efficiency

The platform delivered immediate and tangible value, fundamentally improving how Craftsbury operates.

Established a scalable technology foundation, empowering the Craftsbury Outdoor Center to grow and adapt for the future
Provided an efficient workflow to sign up more than 200 members for programming. Notable that signups often happen in a 20 minute window several times per year.
Eliminated hours of manual data entry and reconciliation, freeing staff to focus on the guest experience.
Provided management with a unified, 360-degree view of guest activity and business performance for the first time.