Case Study: Office (leading UK footwear retailer) doubles online sales with Akamai Technologies

Leading UK retailer doubles online sales with Akamai

Office, a leading UK footwear retailer with more than 100 outlets and a significant online and mail-order business, experienced a major website outage in August 2008 when a promotional email overwhelmed its ISP’s fixed capacity. Needing reliable, scalable performance during traffic spikes (up to 25,000 visitors from promotions) but unwilling to invest in costly infrastructure, Office sought a service-based CDN solution to protect customer experience and enable growth.

In November 2008 Office moved to Akamai’s Dynamic Site Accelerator, gaining global delivery and real-time transactional updates. The switch drove immediate improvements: a 20% uptick in online orders, no outages over the critical Christmas period, a fourfold year-on-year increase during that season, online sales doubling week-on-week, and a ~40% reduction in hosting hardware/support costs as over 80% of requests are now served by Akamai—providing the scalability and reliability to expand promotions and international reach.

Office

Paul Doeman

Head of Commerce