Case Study: Tipsy Elves achieves reliable scaling for massive web-traffic spikes with Rackspace Technology

Tipsy Elves - Customer Case Study

Tipsy Elves, a novelty holiday apparel brand, experienced explosive growth after an appearance on Shark Tank — sales climbed from about $800K in 2012 to $3M in 2013 and were on track for roughly $8M, while site traffic jumped from typical busiest days of ~2,000 to ~30,000 and annual visitors rose to an estimated 4M. That surge created a clear challenge: they needed a scalable, reliable hosting solution to absorb massive, unpredictable spikes without downtime.

They partnered with Rackspace and deployed a resilient stack (load balancers, Nginx front-ends, a cluster of PHP-FPM servers, Lsyncd for file sync, APC/Memcached caching, and a master/slave database setup) that could scale up for broadcasts and scale down afterward. The architecture handled the Shark Tank airing—peaking at an average of 9,500 concurrent users—recovered quickly from a minor kernel issue, reduced post-peak costs, and positioned the company to support its biggest holiday season to date.

Tipsy Elves

Evan Mendelsohn

Co-Founder