Key Impacts
- Victoria’s Secret now enjoys a long-term partnership with proven technology provider
- High-quality images and video became powerful assets in building the Victoria’s Secret brand
- Improved site performance meant record traffic was handled with ease
- The client saved $1 million in infrastructure investments
- Victoria’s Secret can now focus on functional site enhancements rather than infrastructure
In January 1999, Victoria’s Secret aired its first-ever Super Bowl commercial, announcing a live Webcast of its Spring Fashion Show. The ad generated millions of hits on www.VictoriasSecret.com within minutes, and the live Webcast drew a record-breaking 1.5 million visitors worldwide. Success on this scale posed significant technical challenges, and many potential customers were unable to participate due to the site’s inability to support the traffic bursts.
In planning their next major online event, the 2000 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show Webcast live from Cannes, Victoria’s Secret faced a choice: purchase and deploy an immense number of servers to handle short-duration, high-traffic events, or look for a more cost-effective solution to provide capacity on demand. They turned to Akamai, in partnership with IBM, to help deliver an incredible user experience through improved traffic management and faster content distribution. By deploying Akamai EdgeSuite and Akamai Streaming, the client team ensured that the glamorous, high-quality images and video that represent the Victoria’s Secret brand would load quickly and reliably—through any traffic conditions.
"It’s one of those great situations where everybody wins. Akamai enables VictoriasSecret.com to efficiently distribute content for our global e-commerce site while reducing the load on our infrastructure. This provides customers a fast, seamless user experience."
—Chris Evans, Webmaster, VictoriasSecret.com
