My goodness! Simple’s US launch consumes bandwidth

Simple, the UK’s No.1 Facial Skincare brand*, and now one of Unilever’s personal care brands, launched its US website on 1st February 2012. Following an intense development program and a strong pre-launch awareness campaign around the United States, http://www.simpleskincare.com/ went live and very quickly broke all kinds of traffic and visitor numbers.

Within the first few hours, the site experienced 5-6 times the traffic of the equivalent UK site. On top of that, visitors were downloading countless terabytes of streaming video and HTML5 data – ‘off-the-chart’ short-term volumes often only experienced on a monthly basis. And, to be perfectly honest, all this interest and support very nearly brought the site to its knees.

However, a realistic back-up plan that enabled Simple US to regroup on a new server cluster ‘averted any issues’.

But a week is a long time in website life and the day-to-day performance is now fully aligned with the very high service levels provided by the brand’s UK web experience.

With a dedicated Australian Simple website due to go live early in 2012, it will be interesting to gauge the comparable activity in the Southern Hemisphere. But in the meantime, it’s fair to say that Simple, as a brand, continues to grow from strength to strength.


*SymphonyIRI Group All Outlets UK Non Medicated Facial skincare 52 w/e 3rd December 2011

Posted by Idealogy