dbrand

dbrand sells custom vinyl skins for smartphones, laptops, gaming consoles, and various other flagship electronic devices. The company lets customers choose from millions of possible combinations of vinyl skins, and an innovative live preview renders their choices exactly as they would appear on their device. This innovative web experience is dbrand’s entire business; downtime results in a direct hit to revenue, and a great user experience brings in more sales.

dbrand’s business was poised to grow exponentially and needed a WebOps platform that was optimized for performance. To continue iterating on the user experience, the developer team also needed an intermediate test environment that could pull data from the live site.

We can continue scaling with the peace of mind that our site can take a rapid, exponential increase in visitors and stay fast. 

—Adam Ijaz, CEO, dbrand inc.

Challenge

Before Pantheon, dbrand maintained their Drupal website via Git and Beanstalk for code deployment and revisions but found it was difficult to update the site without a dedicated test environment. In order to accelerate innovation, they needed a serverless development solution that could use an up-to-date database from the live site without compromising the site’s uptime.

CEO Adam Ijaz knew the business was poised for exponential growth, but he wasn’t sure the site’s existing web platform could handle traffic spikes. To take dbrand to the next level, he needed the credibility of a stable, scalable WebOps platform.

Approach: Choosing Pantheon with a Trusted Recommendation

To find a new web platform, Ijaz contracted with a temporary web developer. This industry professional had set up multiple sites with Pantheon and highly recommended the WebOps platform as the industry-best for creating rich, innovative digital experiences that scale seamlessly. Having selected Pantheon, dbrand migrated with a smooth onboarding process and zero-downtime launch.

With Pantheon, dbrand Has Its First Million-Dollar Day

dbrand celebrated Black Friday with a promotion that quickly exceeded their expectations. Each $30 purchase gave customers an entry in a sweepstakes to win an $80,000 prize package that included a ride in a Lamborghini and courtside tickets to the NBA All-Star Game. The sweepstakes and accompanying sale brought an influx of new customers — putting the website’s stability to the test with thousands of dollars in sales on the line each minute. The site stayed up and stayed fast, and dbrand saw its first million-dollar day on Pantheon.

Had the site gone down in speed or completely offline, it would have resulted in a catastrophic loss in revenue. As it was, our competitor’s site went down and we were able to capitalize.

With Pantheon, dbrand’s site can handle the heaviest of loads. Even under stress, the user experience is responsive with Pantheon’s Global CDN powering faster page loads than dbrand saw with any previous hosting service.

Results

With Pantheon, dbrand found the dev environment, including the Dev-Test-Live Structured Agile Workflows, and the solid uptime and scalability they needed to make record sales. Pantheon’s performance turned a wildly popular Black Friday promotion into dbrand’s first million-dollar day.

“We can continue scaling with the peace of mind that our site can take a rapid, exponential increase in visitors and purchases and still stay fast,” Ijaz says. “This time next year, we don’t need to worry about uptime. We can fully embrace the increase in site visits and sales.”

Ijaz plans on using Pantheon’s test environment to improve the user experience and increase response times, with massive frontend and backend overhauls that would be impossible with their old host