Case Study: Teespring achieves global platform growth and engineering efficiency with Heroku

Heroku Enables Teespring to Grow its Global Commerce Platform

Teespring is a global commerce platform that enables anyone to design and sell merchandise by handling production, inventory, logistics and customer service. As the business scaled, its monolithic application (migrated from PHP to Rails) became difficult to develop and operate, slowing feature delivery and making it harder to support rapid growth.

Teespring moved to Heroku and adopted a service‑oriented approach, breaking functionality into multiple Heroku apps and microservices, using add‑ons (Postgres, Redis, caching, Cloudinary, etc.), Airflow for ETL, and custom buildpacks to integrate third‑party tools. The shift sped up development and deployment, improved engineering efficiency, and helped fuel global growth—Teespring shipped more than 19 million products and reached roughly one in 75 people in the U.S. by 2014.

Teespring

Lee Edwards

Vice President of Engineering