Lovesac traces its roots to one college kid's desire to take a regular bean bag and supersize it. The finished hand-sewn bag ended up seven feet across. And instead of styrene beads, it used high quality, plush, recycled foam. As the company tells customers, "it's not another damn bean bag." Today, Lovesac sells a complete line of patented, modular furniture online and through its own stores.
It's not a damn beanbag.
Do You Want That Supersized?
Testing The Waters
Lovesac based their first foray into eCommerce on journeyman instance of Magento Enterprise. Their online business grew and prospered and eventually outgrew the capabilities of both their inhouse developer and the native functionality of the Community Edition. As bugs (some serious) crept in and customizations began breaking, the company realized they needed professional help. So they turned to CorraTech and Magento’s Enterprise Edition.
Bomb Proof
After holiday shoppers nearly overran the new site in 2010 in Lovesac decided to, in the words of its eCommerce director, “Build a nuclear bunker.” CorraTech set about deploying the Lovesac site into a completely distributed environment: Load balancer, lots of servers, CDN (content distribution network), custom caching, the works.
Fallout
In 2011, Lovesac had its best holiday shopping season ever, doing more business that month than in the rest of the year combined. The new site architecture exceeded all expectations. It handled large numbers of active shoppers with not so much as a hiccup. Server utilization remained in the target range at all times. And with the confidence that their site could handle anything they threw at it, the marketing team was able to run one aggressive promotion and campaign after another.
Darren Johnson, Director eCommerce, says:
I want to thank you for your awesome work over the past 4 weeks In the last ten days, the website has beaten all of our revenue projections. If we hadn’t done all this [work], we wouldn’t have done half the volume…You guys were online (at all hours, most of them inconvenient) at every critical moment that I needed you and it meant the world to me. You guys really came through this year and we’ve opened up a big new chapter in our company’s history because of it. I’m excited for you to be a part of it.