Paul Smith teams with Internap

Paul Smith Ltd., the pre-eminent British fashion design company, is using Internap’s route-optimised Performance IP™ transit service for the global delivery of its e-commerce platform. Internap’s service will ensure a first-class brand site and online shopping experience for Paul Smith enthusiasts, maximising customer loyalty and web-based revenue.

As website visitors become increasingly reliant on the ability to complete transactions in seconds, it has never been more important for online retailers to offer an outstanding shopping experience with no interruptions or delays. Summit, the online marketing and e-commerce specialist for retail, recently estimated that a retailer with £10 million in annual online sales could lose up to £1 million in revenue each year due to consumer impatience with slow-loading web pages.

A leader in British and international design trends for more than 40 years, the Paul Smith collection is wholesaled in 66 countries and has its own shops throughout North America, Europe and the Middle East and Asia, as well as 17 in England. High performance and availability, as well as low latency, all play a critical role in delivering a seamless online retail experience to a global customer base. The fashion designer’s IT team was looking for a partner that could deliver these characteristics with guaranteed levels of IP transit performance across a worldwide footprint – allowing them to keep pace with the demands of online fashion fans.

“With a fast-growing and geographically dispersed online customer base, it’s imperative that we offer a brand site infused with Paul Smith’s unique creative spirit on every page. Our website is our primary means of communicating with our customers about the latest designs and trends. Whether viewing a collection in our e-commerce shop or browsing Paul’s blog, the site experience is visually-rich, so consistently fast and reliable network connectivity is a critical piece in our IT puzzle,” said Simon Young, web development manager at Paul Smith Ltd. “Internap’s Performance IP transit service delivers bullet-proof connectivity on a global scale, along with an extremely knowledgeable and experienced support team that monitors and ensures network performance, allowing us to stay focused on the business of Paul Smith.”

Internap’s Performance IP service incorporates its patented Managed Internet Route Optimizer™ (MIRO) technology that dynamically evaluates critical network performance factors – such as jitter, latency and packet loss – to automatically direct traffic over the best path to its destination. Continuously scanning Internet routes and making more than 1,300 traffic optimisations per customer per hour, MIRO results in consistently fast website performance. Compared to other carriers, which typically deliver traffic over the fastest path less than 15 percent of the time, MIRO steers traffic over the best-performing network path more than 99 percent of the time.
“A renowned fashion brand in England and throughout the world, Paul Smith requires optimal website performance at all times, making it an ideal use case for our Performance IP service,” said Paul Vian, director of business development at Internap. “Online retailers like Paul Smith are turning to Internap because they realise their rich media website and ecommerce platform investments – which are critical to revenue growth and brand loyalty – can only be fully realised with a reliable and consistently high-performing experience for customers, whether they are in Nottingham, New York or Nagasaki.”