Ted Baker

Global lifestyle brand Ted Baker creates a first-class customer experience with web performance and security solutions from Cloudflare

Ted Baker is a global lifestyle brand whose innovative collections include men’s, women’s, and children’s clothing, footwear, jewelry, bedding, luggage, and more.

The company distributes its products across five continents through multiple channels. The retail channel includes an extensive online presence as well as 377 retail stores and concessions worldwide. The company also distributes products through wholesale and licensing relationships.

Challenge: Deliver an unparalleled online shopping experience regardless of geography

Recently, Ted Baker launched a new digital platform with the goal of enhancing the customer experience to increase conversion and drive higher digital sales. As the company prepared for the platform launch, there were concerns that web page download times in some parts of the world weren’t meeting customer expectations. One reason was that the content delivery network in use at that time didn’t have image repositories close enough to the geographies served by Ted Baker’s retail network.

Another reason was the DDoS attacks, malicious bots, and other threats that virtually every ecommerce site experiences. These attacks can overload a site with malicious traffic, severely degrading performance. Multiple times a week, the Ted Baker security team would receive alerts indicating a possible threat — forcing them to scramble to mount a manual response.

The Ted Baker team wanted a way to place image repositories closer to customers to accelerate image downloads. The company also wanted to strengthen protection against threats without requiring a hands-on response every time.

The solution: Cloudflare delivers exceptional performance for a more satisfying online shopping experience

Ted Baker quickly identified Cloudflare as the optimum solution to address the company’s concerns. The primary reasons: Cloudflare’s extensive global network and its robust application and website security capabilities. The result is a secure and highly performant ecommerce environment.

According to Jagjot Singh, Information Security Officer at Ted Baker, the Cloudflare implementation is enhancing the customer experience. “Slow image download times frustrate online shoppers,” Singh explains. “For us, that can mean lost revenue. Cloudflare boosts our performance at least 23%, which keeps customers on our site.”

Maintaining fast performance regardless of geography or network conditions

Ted Baker uses Cloudflare’s global network to cache product images and details close to customers. Thanks to Cloudflare’s presence in 275 cities and 100 countries, customers anywhere can load images with minimal latency.

Ted Baker customers vary widely in the type and quality of Internet connections they have available. A major Cloudflare benefit is its ability to recognize connection quality for any individual user and compress images accordingly, which improves image download times for customers with low-quality Internet connections. Consequently, the Ted Baker staff no longer spends time searching through logs and checking IP addresses to determine why certain customers experience slow performance.

In addition, Cloudflare Argo Smart Routing monitors the network in real-time looking for performance degradation. When it detects slowdowns, Argo automatically reroutes traffic through the most efficient path to ensure fast load times.

Protecting against known and emerging threats

Cloudflare protects Ted Baker against a variety of external threats — particularly DDoS attacks and malicious bot traffic — that might degrade performance. The Ted Baker team was particularly impressed by how easy it was to set up the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF). Its threat intelligence capabilities block for emerging threats, ensuring that Ted Baker isn’t caught off guard.

Cloudflare has also spared Ted Baker from the effort of responding to each attack manually. “We have been with Cloudflare for almost a year, and there hasn’t been a single instance where we had to jump in to mitigate an issue,” Singh notes. “Cloudflare manages everything for us, so we spend zero time and effort handling tasks like whitelisting IP addresses or mitigating DDoS attacks. It has been a more than worthwhile investment.”

Cloudflare solutions are blocking 100% of Ted Baker’s DDoS attacks, malicious bot activity, and other threats, freeing up significant staff time to focus on strategic projects.

Achieving and communicating success

Cloudflare helps the Ted Baker team improve the company’s ecommerce environment. What’s more, it provides the team with the vehicle to communicate that success to management.

“Cloudflare easily translates to people who don’t speak the language of technology.” notes Singh. “So it’s easy for me to present technical information to senior management and the board. Cloudflare provides that entire bridge between technical details and informative business communication so we can clearly convey the value we are getting from our investment.”