Case Study: Skullcandy achieves faster, more reliable eCommerce launches with New Relic

Skullcandy launches new eCommerce site using New Relic

Skullcandy is a bold, youth-focused audio brand founded in 2003 that rapidly expanded its retail and online channels after launching an eCommerce site in 2008. Rapid growth and frequent, sometimes lengthy outages left the small interactive team blind to application-level issues—discovering problems only after customers reported them—so they needed real-time visibility and faster troubleshooting to keep the site fast and sales reliable.

Skullcandy adopted New Relic’s SaaS monitoring for real user and application performance, which installed in minutes and gave immediate, actionable insights (alerts, transaction traces, SQL diagnostics, App Map). During the Skullcandy 2.0 launch New Relic pinpointed and enabled fixes for database and PHP bottlenecks in under an hour, avoiding a rollback; a Magento extension rewrite monitored by New Relic improved site performance by 25%, and the team cut mean time to repair by about 3x, handled traffic spikes smoothly, and reduced emergency firefighting.

Skullcandy

Andrew Spencer

Director Interactive Technology