NovaMart survived Black Friday — and turned 14 hours of downtime into €420K in new revenue

The problem

A €14M/year fashion retailer whose Magento 1 infrastructure collapsed under load every sale season. Their November 2023 Black Friday resulted in 14 hours of downtime and €114K in lost orders — while competitors scaled effortlessly. The team had been patching the same infrastructure issues for three years with no sustainable fix.

What we built

• Platform migration — Full rewrite to Magento 2.4 with headless PWA storefront decoupled from the backend, enabling independent scaling of each layer
• Caching layer — Redis object cache, Elasticsearch catalog, Varnish full-page caching. Cache hit rate reached 94.2% within 2 weeks of go-live
• AWS Auto Scaling — Event-aware scaling groups with pre-warming scripts deployed 2 hours before planned sales. No more surprise traffic spikes
• Observability — Real-time dashboards, automated incident alerts, and a 15-minute runbook that any engineer can execute solo

Result

“Our first Black Friday on the new platform was the calmest day of the year. Zero incidents. The team actually enjoyed it — which hadn't happened in four years.”

Markus Riedel — CTO, NovaMart GmbH · Frankfurt