Dale Smith and Chris Phillips replaced REI's SaaS search engine with an on-premise Solr stack to improve search performance and flexibility. They faced challenges of matching the previous relevance tuning and limiting SEO impact. Their solutions included using FindTuner and Fusion for management, a "shadow query" model to compare results from both engines, and normalizing the API. Through a collaborative team approach focused on quality, they launched successfully and saw search times improve by 600ms without customers noticing the change.