Marlo Beauty

Marlo Beauty Supply secures SMBs’ customer experience with help from Cloudflare

Marlo Beauty Supply is a distributor to the professional beauty trades, including US-based cosmetologists, nail technicians, spa professionals, and salon managers. Many of the organization’s employees are experienced and licensed practitioners.

Marlo Beauty was founded in 2008 as part of a pivot from brick-and-mortar stores in the Detroit metro area to ecommerce. Since then, the company has grown from an initial client list of 5,000 to serving approximately 40,000 small and medium businesses (SMBs) across all 50 states, shipping 3,000 orders per week.

Challenge: Ensuring continual availability for potential customers

Marlo Beauty receives approximately 1 million visits to its website each month. This includes orders made at all hours of the day and night. Salons and cosmetologists make orders when their schedules permit, whether between servicing customers or after hours.

Approximately 12% of their orders on a weekly basis are made by first-time customers. A poor customer experience could result in lost business and bad reviews shared with colleagues. According to Ingmar Korstanje, Marlo Beauty’s President, “Our customers are busy people, and they often have a limited amount of time to get an order in. We want to do everything we can to protect that customer experience.”

Protecting against automated attacks

In 2017, Marlo Beauty’s online business was growing rapidly, and the growth in sales through this channel made securing the platform a necessity. The company was looking for a web application firewall (WAF) to protect its site and selected Cloudflare based on a recommendation from its digital service provider, Happy Cog. According to Matt Weinberg, President of Technology at Happy Cog, “We recommended Cloudflare to Marlo Beauty because it allowed them to have access to the best firewall in the business, caching, and other enterprise-grade features for $200 per month.”

Marlo Beauty subscribes to the Cloudflare Business Plan, which provides access to the Cloudflare WAF and other services. Cloudflare’s built-in rules and bot detection mechanisms have enabled Marlo Beauty to block automated attacks with minimal effort. On average, Cloudflare blocks hundreds of thousands of attacks per month for Marlo Beauty. According to Korstanje, “The ease and expertise that’s built into Cloudflare gave us confidence, and it’s really rewarding to see our small but mighty team be able to react so quickly to attacks.”

At one point, Marlo Beauty experienced a significant uptick in automated attacks. Automated bots were making small orders on the site in an attempt to test the validity of stolen credit card information. At its peak, the attack involved hundreds of small orders per minute. These attacks increased load on the company’s web servers and forced the customer support team to waste time clearing out the fake orders.

Through the Cloudflare Dashboard, Marlo Beauty was able to quickly and easily take steps to block these attacks. They reviewed traffic analytics and updated IP blocking and rate limits to prevent malicious automated traffic from reaching their systems. Korstanje says, “The Cloudflare Dashboard is fluid and easy to access. It’s nice to be able to make changes on the fly without having full teams dedicated to using the platform.”

The combination of automated blocking and intuitive interfaces enables Marlo Beauty to reduce the potential costs of cyberattacks. The team can rapidly address potential threats, and due to the reduction in malicious traffic, the company no longer has to spend unnecessary AWS compute resources serving unwanted bots.

Optimizing site performance and the user experience

As an ecommerce site in the beauty sector, Marlo Beauty’s website is image-heavy. Customers want to see what they are ordering, but so many large images can slow down page loads. To combat this, the company takes advantage of Cloudflare’s image resizing to serve high-quality images in smaller file formats. This has significantly improved page load times and page speed scores.

For Marlo Beauty, the intuitive nature of the Cloudflare Dashboard enables them to quickly make changes that benefit both the business and its customers. According to Korstanje, “When your customer success and UX managers are able to tell your technical team the Cloudflare features or configurations they need to enhance the user experience, that's pretty powerful.”