Case Study: Skullcandy
Online sales channel speeds sales for iconic audio action sports fusion company, Skullcandy. Running New Relic behind the scenes makes buying Skullcandy’s hip audio products fun, fast, and easy.
Skullcandy became one of the world’s most distinct audio brands by bringing color, character and performance to an otherwise monochromatic space and helped revolutionize the audio arena by introducing headphones, earbuds and other audio and wireless lifestyle products that possess unmistakable style and exceptional performance. From the award-winning, optic-inspired Roc Nation Aviator headphones to the evolutionary fitting FIX earbuds and a roster of some of the world’s finest athletes, musicians and artists, Skullcandy continues to redefine world-class audio performance and style. All of the company’s headphones feature their distinctive Supreme Sound™ and leading-edge design. The company launched their eCommerce site in 2008.
Director Interactive Technology, Skullcandy
Challenges
- Launched in 2008, Skullcandy’s eCommerce site experienced consistent rapid growth
- Young, hip buyers expect the site to be fun, fast and friction-free
- Unplanned outages were increasing
- Lack of performance tools made it difficult to quickly resolve issues and outages
- Interactive team often learned of performance issues from customers
- Outages equate to lost revenue
Solution
- Selected and deployed New Relic SaaS-based solution
- Rapid implementation and immediate results
- New Relic delivered as single integrated solution – alerts, error monitoring, transaction traces, statistics, etc.
- Run New Relic in production and QA environments
- Historical reports provide visibility into how changes impact application
- New Relic specificity helps discovery of root causes for issues
Results
- Identify and fix problems often before visible to customer
- Easier to keep both internal customers and partners happy
- Single DevOps person across three business lines
- Improve productivity through pro-active trouble shooting, preventing emergencies, better cross-team and internal team communications
- Successfully launched significantly redesigned eCommerce site launch during holiday season
- Ability to manage and deliver performance during unplanned traffic spikes
- 25% site performance improvement achieved through the coupon rewrite
- Improved MTTR by 300%.
Environment
CentOS, a distribution of Linux, Apache web server, PHP, Magento, HAProxy, Nginx for load balancing, Redis for caching, memcached, MariaDB, Stackable
