Case Study: Shinola achieves 50% smaller page weight and 1 second faster page loads with imgix

Shinola saves time, accelerates their site and boosts conversions with imgix

Shinola is a Detroit‑based maker of watches, bicycles, leather goods and accessories that sells through 26 retail locations and a Magento Enterprise‑powered online store hosted on AWS, managed by a five‑person development team. Their built‑in image resizing and a homegrown workflow using NFS, rsync and S3 didn’t scale reliably in the cloud, introduced image artifacts from ImageMagick/PHP‑GD, and consumed significant developer time for maintenance and quality assurance.

Shinola switched to imgix, integrating it with a custom Magento plugin (~40 hours of development) to deliver real‑time URL‑based image manipulations and consistent compression. The change eliminated most in‑house image processing work, cut page weight by about 50%, reduced image time‑to‑render by 10–15% and shaved roughly one second off average page loads — while improving image quality and freeing developer time.

Shinola

Ryan Shaltry

Senior Technical Developer/Architect