Case Study: Lush achieves Boxing Day stability and 40% lower hosting costs with Google Cloud Platform

Lush global migration in 22 days

Lush, the UK-founded ethical cosmetics retailer with over £700M in revenue and 930 stores across 49 countries, faced repeated Boxing Day outages—site crashes of up to 18 hours when traffic spiked to ~12 transactions/sec. Locked into a non-scalable platform and needing to migrate 17 sites during December, the company set a 22-day deadline to move its global e‑commerce, mobile and retail systems to a scalable cloud.

Working with Google Cloud Premier Partners Ancoris and Claranet, Lush migrated to Google Cloud Platform using Compute Engine, Cloud SQL and G Suite for rapid deployment and collaboration. The move enabled autoscaling and 99% automated infrastructure, reduced datacenter clusters from five to three, cut hosting costs by 40%, and handled its first post-migration Boxing Day with no instability—while providing a flexible foundation for Kubernetes, microservices and further data initiatives.

LUSH

Ryan Kerry

Global Head of Engineering and Technology