Marisa optimizes the performance of its applications by delivering static and dynamic content with Azion Edge Application

Challenge

Marisa is the largest women’s fashion and lingerie chain in Brazil and top of mind for all Brazilian women. The company has been expanding its digital sales, having surpassed 11 million downloads of the app in 2021^[1] — in which more than 70% of digital channel sales occur^[2] — and evolved its sales on the e-commerce platform by 96% YoY^[3].

However, until the third quarter of 2020, Marisa was focusing its efforts on finding a technology capable of taking its content delivery to the next level and enabling a series of improvements that directly impact the user experience, such as: reduced latency in processing and transferring data to clients throughout Brazil and creating advanced and customizable caching rules for static and dynamic content.

For this, Marisa’s team of infrastructure experts needed modern technology that would not only accelerate innovations and obtain performance gains, but also reduce infrastructure costs.

Solution

Determined to accelerate its digital transformation with modern technology, Marisa found Azion and its line of edge-native products developed for the future demands of the web, able to provide up to 30x faster processing power compared to cloud^[4].

In order to ensure that the implementation of Azion in Marisa’s domains met the expectations, a proof of concept was carried out, in which its team had the opportunity to evaluate the results, receiving all the support necessary from Azion’s engineers to get the most out of the platform.

Using the Edge Application modules, Marisa started caching static and dynamic elements for more than 40 Azion Edge Locations in Brazil, using high customization and management capabilities, providing its team with autonomy to:

• configure caching on dynamic content with 100% availability guaranteed in SLA;
• optimize, convert and manipulate images to enhance the user experience;
• accelerate application and API performance with protocol optimizations and advanced caching rules; and
• perform granular control of APIs by the Rules Engine by activating the Application Acceleration module.

In addition, with Image Processor, Marisa’s pages – which are made up of many high resolution images – are no longer an obstacle to increasing loading speed, as the tool makes it possible to:

• dramatically decrease the latency of loading images by caching rules;
• programmably resize, treat and crop photographs;
• automatically scale to support any number of requests; and
• substantially reduce the image file size.

This combination of products and solutions, together with Marisa’s commitment to deliver the best user experience, have provided fantastic performance indices for the e-commerce platform, significantly improving the shopping experience of millions of customers who access the store via app or website.

Results and impacts

In the first six months of use, the Marisa team built dozens of edge applications that allow their team of experts to improve application performance through:

• custom Edge Cache rules;
• use of Application Acceleration in your domains and APIs; and
• millions of real-time optimized product photos.

With the delivery of dynamic and static content from the edge, Marisa achieved significant gains over the legacy solution, in addition to significantly growing in important indicators to measure the user experience, such as First Contentful Paint, Speed Index and Time to Interactive.

Additionally, Marisa delivers approximately 85% of its data directly to the edge, with over 730 TB of data transferred without impacting the source infrastructure and 4.3 TB of average bandwidth saved per day using Image Processor, providing lighter images without impacting visual quality.

Such initiatives contributed to the acceleration of Marisa’s digital transformation. The 3Q 2021 results indicate a 96%^[5] growth in online sales compared to 2019, while the Marisa app – which represents more than 70% of the share of digital sales – has been consolidating its success, with millions of downloads, 50% conversion rate above the web and 86% satisfaction rate^[6].

About Marisa

Marisa is the largest women’s fashion and lingerie chain in Brazil. Active for more than 70 years, the retailer is present in all regions of the country with 344 stores. One of Marisa’s landmarks is the iconic slogan “From Woman to Woman”, created in the 1980s, and which remains current and connected to the Company’s purpose, which is to strengthen women’s self-esteem. A pioneer in the e-commerce sector, the brand has been offering quality fashion in its online store for more than two decades and, in recent years, it has focused efforts on consolidating itself as a woman’s platform. For this, Marisa has developed multi-channel solutions to make life easier for consumers, such as the Advantage Bag and Click and Collect. In 2021, it opened two Dark Stores, launched a Marketplace aimed at women, Mbank, a division of financial products and services and revamped the Sou Sócia program, an initiative to support female entrepreneurship. Finally, it presented the M Universe to the public, a content hub with exclusive tips on fashion, beauty, health, well-being, finance and important causes within the Marisa universe.