Case Study: Kathmandu achieves simplified access, stronger security, and resilient performance with Cloudflare

Cloudflare’s access management, security, and serverless solutions minimize administrative burdens for Kathmandu’s engineering team

Kathmandu, a Christchurch‑based international retailer of travel and outdoor apparel that recently added Rip Curl to its portfolio, faced a growing security and performance challenge. Its small engineering team found Akamai’s platform overly complex, and the company—running on Magento—was a high‑value target for organized cybercrime and bot attacks that threatened site availability during peak traffic.

Kathmandu replaced its stack with Cloudflare’s CDN, WAF, Access, and later Workers. Cloudflare Access gave employees and global partners a simple, secure way to reach dev and admin tools (the pilot took 30 minutes), while the WAF and CDN blocked malicious traffic (including a 29‑million‑request attack), improved visibility, and kept sites reliable through seasonal spikes of 5–10x normal traffic. Kathmandu is now exploring Workers to decouple Magento and add serverless features like a better store locator.

Kathmandu

James Deane

Web Development Manager