Case Study: Urban Outfitters achieves 50% traffic increase, sub-1 second response times, and 35% quarterly direct-to-consumer revenue growth with Akamai Technologies

Akamai Helps Urban Outfitters Support 50% Increase In Site Traffic, Reduce Response Time To Under One Second, And Increase Quarterly Direct-To-Consumer Revenues By 35%

Urban Outfitters, Inc., the parent of Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, and Free People, planned redesigned e-commerce sites on a new platform and needed to ensure high performance and availability for a global, mobile-savvy customer base. The retailer faced large seasonal traffic spikes (monthly page views rising from ~120–130M to ~200M), needed to protect its brand with fast, reliable pages—targeting sub‑one‑second response on home and gateway pages—and to scale without overprovisioning infrastructure.

By partnering with Akamai for content delivery and acceleration, Urban Outfitters scaled to support a 50% increase in site traffic, cut front‑end bandwidth use by about 30%, and reduced all transaction response times to under one second. The improvements lowered site abandonment, enabled dynamically generated content, and helped drive a 35% increase in quarterly direct‑to‑consumer revenue.

Urban Outfitters

Keary McNew

Manager of IT Engineering, Urban Outfitters, Inc.