ModCloth Success Story
Customer Company Size
Mid-size Company
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- SmartOS SmartMachines
- Ruby on Rails web application framework
- MySQL data store
- Solr indexing
- Traditional caching (memcached, redis)
Tech Stack
- SmartOS
- Ruby on Rails
- MySQL
- Solr
- Memcached, Redis
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Customer Satisfaction
- Brand Awareness
Technology Category
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Sales & Marketing
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Supply Chain Visibility
- Inventory Management
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
ModCloth is an online retailer that specializes in vintage-inspired women’s fashion and decor. The company was founded in 2002 by high school sweethearts Eric Koger and Susan Gregg Koger. ModCloth.com sells indie labels such as BB Dakota, Tulle, EC Star, and Stop Staring. The site features a lifestyle blog and encourages visitor participation with a Be the Buyer program, where users vote for new styles. The U.S.-based company has 300 team members among three locations: its San Francisco headquarters, Pittsburgh office and fulfillment center, and Los Angeles buying office. The company's mission is to empower their community of shoppers through a social commerce platform that brings product to market with customer feedback and validation.
The Challenge
ModCloth, an online retailer specializing in vintage-inspired women’s fashion and decor, was experiencing rapid growth and needed a highly scalable, agile, and consistent cloud infrastructure to support its ecommerce website. The company's site experience is built around a quick and agile inventory strategy that involves launching 25 to 50 items every day, resulting in 30% of customers visiting more than once per day. Therefore, the performance of the website was a business imperative. ModCloth needed visibility into its infrastructure to solve performance issues and ensure the applications were built correctly for future performance on the platform. The company also needed to deliver a consistently great experience to customers, regardless of how busy the site was or how congested the network might become. Furthermore, ModCloth needed the ability to make changes quickly to take advantage of new opportunities and respond to customers’ changing behaviors.
The Solution
ModCloth chose to move from a traditional Linux platform running Ruby on Rails to Joyent Cloud with Ruby on Rails running on SmartOS. The company was immediately pleased with the performance of Joyent Cloud and its support team. With the shift from bare metal infrastructure to Joyent Cloud, ModCloth saw no degradation of application performance. In fact, I/O performance has been excellent. ModCloth was able to save money on Joyent Cloud by running resources at high utilization rates – up to 80% – without resource contention or performance slowdowns. It’s fast and easy to change up infrastructure in Joyent Cloud, adding new SmartMachines and new disk or memory resources. Joyent Cloud also manages SSH keys in a straightforward way that makes it simple for administrators to securely sign in and make changes to their environment, including provisioning new hosts to meet rising workloads or dialing down unneeded resources to save money.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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