Secura are delighted to welcome the UK’s leading fancy dress costumes and accessories manufacturer, RH Smith & Sons to the Virtual Private Cloud platform.
RH Smith & Sons or Smiffys, as they are more widely known in the dress-up market, are a family business with over 120 years’ heritage. They pride themselves on their extensive and ever evolving product collection and enjoy huge success across the globe, shipping over 26 million items each year to over 53 territories, both to a network of stockists and consumers direct.
All their products are designed in-house by their Creative Services team, ensuring unique, original, high-quality costumes and accessories, with a constantly expanding range that increases by 1000 lines each year.
Every year in the UK and abroad, they help transform party goers and trick-or-treaters into anything from superheroes to cartoon characters – with the accessories, masks and wigs to match.
Smiffys support over 5000 retailers globally – from small independent fancy dress and party shops to large, nationwide supermarkets chains – with rapid, same-day dispatch of products from their Gainsborough headquarters.
Product availability is vital to ensure quick delivery to customers and with over 3,000 products stocked year round and nearly 2,000 additional products added seasonally, they operate a sophisticated inventory and e-commerce system to ensure that this process runs smoothly and efficiently.
Smiffys cloud hosting needs to be secure and highly available to support their critical e-commerce and warehousing systems, but it also needs incredible scalability to cope with pronounced seasonal traffic spikes, particularly in the run-up to Halloween in October, now a worldwide trend and growing.
Sales peak during these times and the team at Smiffys needed infrastructure that could absorb this additional traffic, keep services online and deliver a consistent, high quality user experience.
The Virtual Private Cloud platform offers the security and stability that Smiffys require to support these vital internal systems and provide the top-quality service their customers expect. As scalability is a core feature of the VPC, Smiffys have the option to quickly flex their resources up and down at anytime to cope with the seasonal fluctuations their business experiences.
The VPC also provides fast, reliable disaster recovery to protect Smiffys’ critical business and customer data in the event of any issues. Data is replicated to an alternative VPC site away from the live solution and is available for rapid recovery if DR is invoked in the event of an incident, protecting their operation against any long-term disruption.
Secura CEO, Ollie Beaton commented:
We’re thrilled to add a business of RH Smith & Sons’ calibre to the Virtual Private Cloud. They are a huge UK success story, with a global customer base and the team here are really excited to be able to support such a dynamic and growing business with our cloud services.
For more information on RH Smith & Sons, please visit their website at www.smiffys.com.
Image credit: kiselevandreyvalerevich/Shutterstock.com
Neal works in the marketing team at Secura and makes sure everyone uses the correct font size on their emails. Sometimes he succeeds.
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