Case Study: HauteLook achieves scalable, lower-cost image conversion in the cloud with Akamai Technologies

Nordstromrack.com | HauteLook Gains Newfound Scalability While Lowering Costs by Converting Images in the Cloud

Nordstromrack.com | HauteLook, the online off-price division of Nordstrom, runs two shopping sites that serve thousands of product images to millions of customers daily. Because more than two-thirds of its visitors use non‑PC devices, the retailer needed many device-specific image variants; its in‑house image‑resizing software was costly to maintain, hard to manage, and could not reliably scale to daily traffic spikes up to 10x off‑peak levels.

HauteLook adopted Akamai’s Image Converter Cloudlet to perform just‑in‑time image conversion at the edge. The quick transition offloaded on‑premises infrastructure, enabled dynamic resizing by device and connection, and scaled seamlessly for peak traffic—eliminating unpredictable costs, repurposing data‑center resources, protecting sales, and freeing the team to focus on new features.

Hautelook

Herman Radtke

VP of Engineering