Case Study: Major American Multinational Manufacturer and Marketer (Estée Lauder) achieves 100% shoppable sites during server outages with Varnish Software (Varnish Enterprise)

Major American Multinational Manufacturer and Marketer

Estée Lauder, a major multinational cosmetics company, needed its hundreds of e-commerce sites to remain 100% accessible and shoppable even during server outages. Their existing cache could not continue to serve stale content during backend failures, and the team faced a tight timeline before the holiday/code‑freeze period to deploy a solution that would integrate with their Akamai CDN.

They implemented Varnish Enterprise as an origin shield, deployed in about two months with Varnish engineer support and an Akamai Connector, providing request coalescing, soft purges and high availability. The solution protected origin servers during downtime (preventing lost sales during a two‑hour post‑Black Friday outage), improved logging and analytics, delivered fast ROI, and set the stage to expand caching to additional assets.