[Case Study] How HYLETE went from a Black Box to the World`s Most Scalable Hosting Infrastructure

HYLETE is a direct-to-consumer brand that creates premium performance athletic apparel – built for the modern athlete and priced for everyday use. What started with one training short in 2012 has grown into an extensive line of men’s and women’s apparel, backpacks, and the first HYLETE cross-training shoe.

As a direct-to-consumer brand, HYLETE’s website (and online storefront) is the lifeblood of their business and needs to be up 24×7.

Breaking Free from a Black Box

Scott Kennerly, HYLETE’s Vice President of Technology and Operations, is not a fan of “black box” solutions. With their previous hosting partner, Scott and his team didn’t have any visibility into how servers were performing, errors, or code issues that they needed to fix. He was looking for a hosting solution where they would have complete visibility and control over their environment.

HYLETE also wanted their environment to scale automatically when they would have large, unpredictable traffic spikes in response to flash sales or marketing promotions, so they could ensure 100% website uptime for shoppers.

Most importantly, they wanted a partner to help them when things got out of their expertise. In essence, HYLETE was looking for an extension to their technology team, one with proven e-commerce and cloud infrastructure expertise.

The World’s Most Scalable Hosting Infrastructure

With Webscale, HYLETE got a stable, secure, and scalable hosting solution. Webscale offers unlimited, real-time, and predictive auto-scaling, capable of forecasting traffic surges and scaling ahead of demand automatically, to ensure 100% uptime, regardless of traffic volume. This enables HYLETE to execute massive flash sales and promotions without downtime or performance slowdowns. “Since deploying Webscale, the improvements have been really dramatic,” said Scott.

Recently, HYLETE ran their largest flash sale in company history and saw unprecedented levels of site traffic. Their online storefront (hylete.com) had zero issues, orders were going through, and the site ran exactly how they wanted (and needed) it to work.

Unprecedented Visibility and Control

With Webscale, HYLETE has end-to-end, real-time visibility into their hosting environment, server infrastructure, site traffic, and user experience. “We can solve a lot of problems that way,” added Scott.

HYLETE has access to Webscale’s visibility and control portal, where they can not only monitor their environment, but also take care of simple things like whitelisting an IP or updating a certificate, themselves. Furthermore, the Webscale solution allows HYLETE to retain complete control of their AWS account.

World-Class Customer Support and Expertise

HYLETE receives 24x7x365 proactive customer support from Webscale. When something goes wrong and the HYLETE team gets an alert, they know that the Webscale team is taking care of it. In other words, Webscale’s customer support team gives HYLETE immense peace of mind during issues, along with unmatched infrastructure and e-commerce expertise. The brand has round-the-clock access to Webscale’s award-winning team of cloud and e-commerce experts, with more than 30 accreditations and certifications across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (CGP), and Microsoft Azure.

When asked about the overall experience with Webscale, Scott summed it up in two words: “It’s fantastic!” Hear HYLETE’s story, in their own words, in this video.

If you would like us to help you achieve similar results for your online storefront, drop us a note at sales@webscale.com.