# The Resolution Layer  
## Case Study in BriefEKOM

### A national sporting-goods retailer.

A full-catalog, no-schema read across footwear, apparel, and equipment — one of a set of anonymized EKOM analyses. What surfaced, and where it leads.

#### Vertical
Sporting Goods — footwear, apparel, equipment

#### Method
48 focused passes · no setup

#### Issues surfaced
622 distinct

### This pass
**Read & diagnose**  
**Lead finding**  ·  highest-visibility  
The wrong team on team merchandise.

On a team-loyal storefront, these get noticed: an **Atlanta Braves** tee filed under the **Los Angeles Dodgers** shop; a **Milwaukee Bucks** snapback whose bullets read "Team: Chicago Bulls"; an **Indiana Fever** jersey tagged **Indiana Pacers**; a **Las Vegas Raiders** hat still listing "Oakland Raiders." And every Pro Standard MLB item has a blank team field — so none appear in shop-by-team navigation at all.

### Also surfaced
**Products in the wrong place**  
A jumpsuit filed as a pant, men's shorts under women's, jacket-vests routed to "T-Shirts," and live items with no category at all — orphaned from navigation.

**Contaminated & leaked copy**  
A softball bat carrying Air Jordan editorial copy, an internal "(HOLD)" vendor status shown to shoppers, and raw merchandising codes in live descriptions.

**Attributes that break filters**  
A polyester jersey tagged "Denim," cycling shorts tagged "Tights," and missing sizeChartId on many items — a known driver of returns.

### The SKU layer
A purchasable sneaker whose every size is flagged non-searchable, size runs pointing to the wrong parent product, and nine men's SKUs labeled "Women's Shoe."

**How EKOM read it.** With no schema and no manual setup, the engine profiled the catalog and ran 48 focused passes — partitioning by product family (apparel, footwear, licensed, equipment, cleats…) and, within each, by sub-type or brand — so category-specific defects like a wrong team tag or a denim attribute on a jersey surface cleanly instead of averaging away. Findings de-duplicated across passes.

**From diagnosis to channel-ready.** This pass read and diagnosed. The same understanding powers what follows — correcting the team tags and miscategorizations, enriching the fields that make products findable (sizeChartId, team tags, filterable attributes), running the full variant layer, and holding the line at intake so a catalog scaling under new investment stays clean.