AT–A–GLANCE COMPANY: John Hardy INDUSTRY: Jewelry and luxury accessories WHAT THEY DO: John Hardy is a handmade jewelry brand reshaping the experience of luxury through a heritage of design, craftsmanship, quality and sustainability. IT GOALS: John Hardy looked to partner with a trusted IT hosting company to improve website performance globally; receive 7X24X365 technical support; ensure 100% network uptime of its global website; and have a secure and reliable hosting experience to support its expansion in Asia. SOLUTION: John Hardy chose Rackspace’s dedicated hosting solution to enjoy guaranteed SLAs, 24x7x365 support, comprehensive security protection and the flexibility to scale. John Hardy Fuels Global E-Business Expansion with Rackspace Managed Hosting and Fanatical Support ® LUXURY E-MARKET, A GROWING TREND Founded in Bali in 1975, John Hardy’s collections are available in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France and Indonesia among other countries. In September 2011, John Hardy launched its first ever men’s store at one of Hong Kong’s most prestigious shopping malls, The Landmark. John Hardy is widely recognized as a luxury handmade jewelry brand in the United States. However, the jewelry brand has global expansion plans to rapidly grow its business in a number of markets across Europe, Asia and further in North America. In order to capture the fast-growing e-commerce and online shopping audience for luxury items, John Hardy decided to revamp its U.S. website, launching it in September 2011. That was followed by the launches of the company’s Australia and Canada websites in November 2011 and its global site in March 2012. John Hardy wanted to provide the best customer experience not only for the 30,000 plus members of its Hardy Klub, but also for fashion and jewelry lovers around the world. Its ultimate IT goal is to expand its e-business while increasing the number of online purchases. “More and more people are going online to search for and purchase luxury products, we recorded 100% year-on-year growth of purchases online this year,” said Janice Chan, e-commerce director, John Hardy USA Services Ltd. “This reinforced our Rackspace Hosting Asia Pacific Regional Office: 9/F, Cambridge House, Taikoo Place, 979 King’s Road, Quarry Bay, Hong Kong Sales +852 3752 6488 Support +852 3752 6464 fax +852 2805 0070 Website Address: www.rackspace.com.hk Rackspace Australia Suite 3, Level 7, 210 George Street, Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia Sales 1800 722 577 Support 1800 421 267 Website Address: www.rackspace.com.au BENEFITS: Partnering with Rackspace gives John Hardy a worry-free IT solution to enhance customer experience and concentrate on developing its online shop and its upcoming expansion plans in Asia. need to work with a reliable hosting partner to keep our website secure and up-and-running 24/7 to ensure our valued customers are satisfied with the performance of our website.” EXPERIENCES WITH OTHER HOSTING COMPANIES John Hardy previously used a shared server offered by another hosting company. The experience, Chan said, wasn’t a pleasant one. “We were attacked by distributed denial-of-service twice a year, on average, which resulted in downtime of our site. Those were not fun times,” said Chan. To make matters worse, as John Hardy was using a shared server, sometimes they were not the target of attack, but fell prey to the code injection from other companies sharing the same server. As a result, the loading time of the website became much slower than it should have been. Chan wanted stability. “Any downtime of our website will impact our brand image and customers’ loyalty. This puts us under a lot of pressure especially when the online business is growing so fast. We want to deliver a seamless user experience and make sure our customers are engaged in the process, which will keep them coming back,” she said. To solve the challenges, John Hardy decided to switch to a more reliable and trusted hosting partner. After conducting its own research and seeking advice from its web consultant company, John Hardy decided to select Rackspace in June 2011 based on its product offering, global presence, server capacity and its renowned Fanatical Support®. BENEFITS OF RACKSPACE’S DEDICATED HOSTING Rackspace provides John Hardy with a highly secure hosting experience with industry-leading SLAs and 24x7x365 Fanatical Support®. Rackspace also offers the jewelry brand a highly secure and stable platform for online shopping. “Partnering with Rackspace has given us much-needed peace of mind. Whenever an issue occurs, we can quickly and easily get a hold of experts from Rackspace through its Fanatical Support,” said Chan. “Rackspace helps ensure that customers and visitors get the fastest access to our websites by greatly reducing the page load time and thus enhancing their experience.” The issue of downtime and virus attacks facing John Hardy has been mitigated due to Rackspace’s services and, as a result, the company’s websites have recorded a much lower bounce rate. In addition to managed hosting services, Rackspace has increased the infrastructure capacity for John Hardy, which now enables their websites to manage a high volume of traffic and ensure reliability. “Every season we have new product launches. Last Christmas in 2011, the website traffic doubled as a result of our marketing campaign,” recalled Chan. “With Rackspace, we were able to handle more than 4,000 concurrent visitors during that period.” Eighty percent of John Hardy’s total traffic is from the United States. The company hosts its global website out of Rackspace’s data centres in Chicago and Hong Kong. Rackspace’s global presence is a perfect fit with John Hardy’s business expansion plans, Chan said. “We are expanding into other markets aggressively. As Rackspace’s data centres are located all over the world, the partnership has strengthened our capability to expand our business without any hesitation on the IT front,” said Chan. WHAT’S NEXT? John Hardy is planning to add servers and increase its infrastructure capacity to support its upcoming marketing campaign and business expansion plans. “Having launched our first physical store in Hong Kong in The Landmark in September 2011, we will follow with the launch of our website for Hong Kong shoppers very soon. With the strong track record of Rackspace’s offering, we believe our trusted hosting partner is more than capable of giving us further mileage to support our expansion,“ Chan concluded. Rackspace Hosting Asia Pacific Regional Office: 9/F, Cambridge House, Taikoo Place, 979 King’s Road, Quarry Bay, Hong Kong Sales +852 3752 6488 Support +852 3752 6464 fax +852 2805 0070 Website Address: www.rackspace.com.hk Rackspace Australia Suite 3, Level 7, 210 George Street, Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia Sales 1800 722 577 Support 1800 421 267 Website Address: www.rackspace.com.au