Vanity Boum is a Parisian startup, founded in 2015 by Adélaïde Enlart. She creates unique lamps with a chic and vintage look, in collaboration with artisans from all over the world.

Most of Vanity Boum’s business happens online through their eshop. Website performance is crucial for their brand development and guarantees their customers a seamless experience. Their sales model is based on two flash sales per year with around 30 creations being sold in a matter of hours. However, their infrastructure was proven problematic, couldn’t support peak traffic, and seriously damaged user experience.

Adélaïde, founder of Vanity Boum, and Joachim, CTO of Akrolab, Vanity Boum’s web agency, walk us through how Artifakt helped Vanity Boum scale and regain the trust of their customers!

Before the project

“Our main issue was our website performance: page loading time was slow due to higher than expected traffic. It was clear that our infrastructure wasn’t adapted to our needs and auto-scaling wasn’t optimized, even though we tested different peaks in traffic,” explains Joachim. 

Developed originally on Shopify, another challenge was to migrate the Vanity Boum website to WooCommerce. “We were facing technical difficulties, especially with adding items to the cart,” describes Joachim.

“Before using the services of Akrolab, previous sales didn’t give an optimized customer experience. The website was sluggish, sometimes wouldn’t work at all. Servers went down, we had to postpone the sale. What is certain is that our revenue was impacted and so was our brand. It hit me hard and I was pretty worried” says Adélaïde, creator of Vanity Boum.

Joachim, who was already working with Artifakt on another project, advised Adélaïde to assign the deployment, management, and hosting of her eCommerce website to Artifakt.

The project

Artifakt delivered the cloud infrastructure and the cloud environments in 3 weeks.

“Communication was flowing between us and Artifakt. The tool really helps, it streamlines collaboration between us but also within the different developers that work on the website. Even though we’re not total newbies on the topic, Artifakt brings their expertise for the set up. Load balancer, several fixed servers, auto-scaling, cache Redis… We have everything we need now to technically ensure Vanity Boum’s next sales,” explains Joachim.

“I didn’t want to have the same experience as before. My only goal was to offer a seamless experience to my clients. Really build back the trust without any worry. My relationship with the Artifakt team was really positive. The commercial engineer really took the time to listen to my fear and offered a solution matching our needs and budget. The Artifakt Customer Success Manager was also very reassuring, even when the deal was done. It was a very human approach to business,” says Adélaïde.

The effort has been widely praised by our customers, who can finally make their purchases with confidence, without bugs or downtime.

Deploying to the cloud without any downtime

“Clearly, everything went smoothly—no loading time, no downtime. The console shows really good website performance. Since we outsourced the project, we had zero problems with hosting. And this isn’t the only benefit. Artifakt is a tool that, before anything else is built for developers. Even though I still don’t use it to its full potential, it already helps me daily on my web projects:

• Simplifies and standardizes code deployment.
• Centralizes all logs (production, preprod, test) on one interface—this really limits errors and bugs.
• Deploys projects in three clicks.
• Simplifies billing.

People are asking why we didn’t go directly to AWS or other cloud providers. We did it in the past. But what seemed simple, ended up very time-consuming and needed advanced cloud expertise. I think we should leave this part of the job to experts. My developer team wants to focus on the coding and creation part. Artifakt allows us to deploy faster and several times a day if needed. And we don’t have to worry about infrastructures and their performance.”—Joachim

First sale boosted by great website performance

“I didn’t experience this last sale the same way as the previous ones. I was very nervous the day before our last sale but our Customer Success Manager at Artifakt took all the necessary steps to reassure me. He made different loading stress tests live with me so I could see by myself that my new website would be perfect for my clients. Sales day went really well. We received a lot of positive feedback on the performance of our website and our user experience was way better. We had to gain back the trust of our customers and I think we started doing just that. We hadn’t included Artifakt in our yearly budget plan, but when I saw how easy-to-use it was and the results it brought, I’m glad we did. I was skeptical on the subject, even if I totally trust Joachim. I’m happy I decided to trust him once more,” adds Adélaïde.

Why would you recommend Artifakt?

Adélaïde says, “Managing a web project, its hosting, infrastructure configuration, etc is a full-time job—we need to leave this to specialists instead of wasting time, energy, and skills that could be put to better use elsewhere. For all these reasons, I recommend Artifakt to all eCommerce owners. People at Artifakt are not only cloud experts but also experts on eCommerce platforms (Magento, DrupalCommerce, WooCommerce, Akeneo, etc…)—that’s just the perfect combo for our industry. I’m no longer asking myself if my website will stay online or handle the traffic.”

Joachim adds, “On top of increasing the website performance, we see the added value for agencies and developers. Artifakt is a tool that helps devs on a daily basis. Artifakt automates a huge chunk of daily tasks, streamlines teamwork, and most importantly, we don’t need to spend countless hours on infrastructure. Performance is there. Artifakt gives us the autonomy to deploy and peace of mind regarding cloud infrastructure—everything is taken care of. I advise other clients to use Artifakt in their cloud deployment and web app management workflow.”

Do you want to explore what Artifakt can do for your business? Schedule a demo with us today!