28 by Sam Wood

The challenge

When 28 By Sam Wood approached us, they were searching for a team that were extremely technical, could meet their high standards and a proven track record building high growth platforms to accomodate their rapid growth. With an influx of new customers and an increasing volume of traffic, we had to develop a solution that was scalable and could support 10 times the number of members at the time. This was crucial in ensuring that the platform would be able to handle the community without the need for frequent rebuilding.

Sam had big plans for expanding the offerings beyond meal plans and workouts to include yoga, pilates, various trainers, retreats, pregnancy programs, dietary options and more. Our goal was to design a platform that was flexible and capable of adapting to the changing needs and growth of the business.

Our approach

Before we got started, we needed to complete a benchmark analysis (we basically needed to do our research how the current site was performing). Our analysis included looking into specifics such as site load, server load, transaction rate, weekly trends, and general gaps.

Taking the needs and goals of 28 By Sam Wood into account, we decided that the best route forward would be a custom web application. This thinking allowed us to ensure that if the platform needed any further changes or updates in the future, they could easily be done without having to fight an off-the-shelf platform/CMS.

The outcome

Our final product used a Ruby on Rails platform with AWS auto-scaling infrastructure. The overall environment, complete custom code and infrastructure setup has been wildly successful resulting in no downtime, program interruptions or faults since its launch. We also took AWS costs into mind too which is often overlooked. At launch there was an 80% reduction in AWS costs from a server and data delivery perspective.

Since our completion, the platform has been ever-evolving. While a large number of custom enhancements have been added, the quality of the platform has not been compromised and with no limitations on business requirements.

28 By Sam Wood has been one of our most successful web application launches to date selling for $71 million in 2022.