Build-A-Bear Workshop Case Study: Performance Means Conversion

Build-A-Bear Workshop^® is a global interactive entertainment retailer with nearly 400 stores all over the world with an engaging commerce-based website. Its website experienced occasional outages and slowness with the previous managed hosting provider that impacted the retailer’s conversion rate.

The site buildabear.com^® was relaunched with Spark::red in October 2012. From the very beginning, it became clear that the new website performed better and was able to support the retailer’s projected online growth.

With Spark::red, Build-A-Bear pushed multiple releases prior to the holiday season that allowed the Company to test all systems before peak traffic. Load testing provided by Spark::red helped further optimize buildabear.com, resulting in stability and performance that the ompany had not achieved with the previous hosting provider.

During the 2012 holiday season, website traffic exceeded 4,000 requests per minute with no degradation of the website performance and 100% up-time. This outstanding website performance allowed Build-A-Bear to focus on growing its online sales. The result was a doubled onsite conversion rate when compared to the previous year’s holiday season.