From Bottlenecks to Breakthroughs: How Zoro Built a Business Growth Engine on Composability
Inside Zoro’s transformation: how MACH architecture, AI-powered scale, and a customer-obsessed culture turned a complex catalog into a billion dollar growth engine.
What happens when you give a tech-forward distribution company the autonomy to experiment, the architecture to scale, and a culture that backs fast, smart change? You get Zoro.com, a $1.2B business where technology doesn’t just support operations, it is the operation.
This is the story of a team that moved from six-month product rollouts to ten-day SKU launches, from brittle ERPs to AI-driven agility. Zoro’s composable foundation isn’t just about better architecture. It’s about building a smarter system that gets better as it grows.
The Digital Evolution of Zoro
Zoro exists to help businesses and their people thrive, making it easy for customers to find and purchase everything they need to keep their operations running. And when Andrew Goodfellow joined Zoro over seven years ago, the company was on a path to grow fast. Really fast.
In 2018, Zoro had roughly 2 million SKUs and $500M in revenue. Today, they have 15 million SKUs and $1.2B in revenue, and a tech org that accounts for 42% of its total team. To say they pursued their path to growth successfully would be an understatement.
But like many high-growth orgs, there were tradeoffs made to achieve their targets. Aggressive growth had led to an increasingly brittle tech backbone, which was going to pose a challenge to long-term scalability and success. So how did they strengthen their core to support that kind of growth? By doubling down on their technology approach at scale.
As Goodfellow puts it, “Technology is key to what we do.”
That means moving beyond traditional IT support into something much more transformational. His team’s mission is to build and operate a growth engine—not just a website—designed to acquire and retain customers at scale. The shift to a MACH-based reference architecture in 2019 made that vision real.
Composable at Scale
Zoro manages a staggering 15 million SKUs.
What’s more impressive is how quickly they got there—scaling from 2 million to 15 million items in just a few years. Managing a catalog of that magnitude required a fundamental shift in how the team worked. They moved away from slow, waterfall-style workflows and built a high-speed enrichment engine designed for scale. What once took six months—introducing new products—now happens in 10 days, thanks to a smart mix of composable tooling, homegrown systems, and ruthless focus on what matters to their small and midsize business customers across industries.
“We had targets of adding 2 million SKUs a year, so then you’re adding an entire Zoro-sized business every year,” says Goodfellow. “You have to move differently.”
The team had to make some choices to get the NPI (new product introduction) times down. “We lowered some bars where we could,” he said, but there’s a balance. “We needed to make sure that the important things—like customer safety or hazardous material information—that we get all that stuff in. But beyond that, we said ‘Give us a title, a price, and an image and we’ll put it online. We’ll add the data later.’”
That shift in approach made it possible to increase their assortment seven-fold without sacrificing control. Regulated products still go through full compliance checks, but for everything else, Zoro uses automation, AI, and iterative enrichment to move fast, getting items online quickly, then improving the data over time based on real-world performance.
Their custom-built search, recommendation, and data platforms sit on top of MACH tools, creating something distinctly Zoro. The ability to ingest millions of SKUs per hour, normalize massive volumes of product data, and surface results with precision—all while maintaining full control of the storefront—isn’t something you buy off the shelf. It’s what composable maturity looks like in action.
Customer Obsession in Action
Zoro’s tech investments are designed with one thing in mind: making life easier for their customers. That includes small businesses who shop by manufacturer part number—which is how their audience shops most of the time—and also those who browse with vague terms like “gloves”, which could mean anything from latex dental gloves to heavy-duty welding gloves. Knowing the customer makes all the difference.
Using LLMs and custom data pipelines, Zoro classifies users into industry categories based on behavioral signals, not just purchases. That means a returning miner sees mining gear. A dentist sees nitrile gloves. And with Talon.one, Zoro personalizes promotions based on actual needs, not batch-and-blast tactics.
They’re also rolling out on-site merchandising through Builder, giving their marketing team the power to shift demand within the storefront. Think of industry-specific workspaces for welders or healthcare buyers. These aren’t just upsells; they’re time-savers.And they reinforce Zoro’s value as a one-stop shop for getting the job done by helping customers keep their operations running smoothly.
Culture, Change, and Growth
None of this would work without Zoro’s approach to team design and governance. The company has grown significantly, but Goodfellow remains a “standard bearer” for a culture that prizes innovation, autonomy, and speed. “If we’re not shipping with some flaws, we may be going too slow,” he quips.
That mindset is backed by a hybrid PMO structure that supports both agile and traditional project paths. Scrum masters work directly with product teams, while change comms and process rigor help keep the rest of the org aligned. “We don’t have a dedicated change management org,” notes Goodfellow, “but I think that’s because it’s in everything we do. We’re wired for growth, and when you’re growing, you’re changing.”
By investing in complex, composable infrastructure and solving high-scale problems, Zoro attracts and retains top-tier engineering talent, people who want to move fast, ship often, and build what’s next.
“That helps us attract top talent and keep that talent. And therefore, when new stuff needs to happen, it's quickly embraced.”
Agentic Systems and the Road Ahead
Zoro’s AI strategy is more than exploratory; it’s operational. They’ve built systems that combine generative and agentic AI, stitched together with confidence thresholds and human-in-the-loop review. From product fitment tools for automotive parts to customer classification using NAICS codes, Zoro’s data and AI team is deep in the weeds— and thriving there.
“We’re leveraging AI to automate where we can and hand off where we can’t,” Goodfellow explains. If the system flags low confidence, a human steps in. The corrected output gets re-fed into the pipeline, improving the model. It’s not hype. It’s hygiene. And it’s working.
While AI grabs headlines, Goodfellow is also focused on the foundational work of decoupling from legacy systems. Zoro’s ERP still handles too much, in his view, but that’s changing fast. As they’ve gone deeper into the MACH transformation, the team gets closer to the core ERP and its limitations.
Right now, their ingestion engine outstrips it by an astounding order of magnitude. That’s forcing the team to build workarounds to support Zoro’s rapid scale— eventually, they’ll have to make that final big adjustment, stripping it down to a general ledger and using best-of-breed systems to manage what an ERP was never designed to tackle in the first place.
The Final Word
Zoro’s transformation isn’t about chasing trends. It’s about building a business that gets better as it scales. Composability gave them the freedom to experiment. AI gave them the tools to go faster. But culture—their unapologetic commitment to moving quickly, solving real problems, and staying close to the customer—is what made it all stick.
Goodfellow sums it up best: “It’s fun to work for a growing company.”
Leigh Bryant
Editorial Director, Composable.com
Leigh Bryant is a seasoned content and brand strategist with over a decade of experience in digital storytelling. Starting in retail before shifting to the technology space, she has spent the past ten years crafting compelling narratives as a writer, editor, and strategist.