Case Study: DUFL achieves rapid launch and scalable premium baggage‑valet service with Heroku

Travel Bag-Free with a Premium Baggage Valet Service on Heroku

DUFL is a premium travel valet that ships, cleans, photographs, inventories and stores travelers’ clothing so frequent flyers can travel bag‑free. To deliver this service quickly and reliably, the company needed a scalable, modular platform that supported their preferred tech stack, integrated with AWS and Salesforce, handled custom inventory and logistics workflows, and let the engineering team operate without hiring dedicated DevOps.

DUFL built the system on Heroku—a dozen+ apps in a horizontal architecture using Node.js/MEAN, Ember front end, the Heroku MongoDB add‑on and AWS services (S3, CloudFront, SQS, Redshift)—with a messaging bus, REST APIs, GitHub/Heroku Pipelines, Review Apps and Travis CI for rapid deployment, plus add‑ons like New Relic and SSL. The result: two‑click deployments, no DevOps hires, a fast mid‑2014 launch and rapid expansion (including DUFL Sports), while customers enjoy seamless app‑driven packing, shipping, pickup, cleaning and storage.

DUFL

AJ McGowan

Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer