KIKO Milano eliminated 3 weeks of annual Black Friday infrastructure prep by migrating their ecommerce app from manually scaled AWS EC2 instances to Vercel. Before the move, scaling required hand-tuned server capacity, application-side configuration changes, and dedicated war rooms staffed to triage failures. If demand exceeded forecasts, the site slowed or broke, costing direct revenue.
After migration, build times dropped from 20 minutes to under 4 minutes on average, the team moved from minimal releases to multiple deploys per day, and automatic scaling now handles traffic spikes without any team intervention. Their Next.js app runs on infrastructure that separates static delivery, cached pages, and dynamic compute, so each layer scales independently. Environment provisioning, previously a coordination bottleneck across dev, test, pre-prod, and prod, now happens on demand without code changes.
The full case study is worth reading for the operational math: KIKO's engineering lead Ant estimates Vercel saves his team nearly one full day per week in accumulated friction. The piece details exactly what their pre-Vercel Black Friday playbook looked like, step by step, which makes the before-and-after contrast concrete and replicable for any ecommerce team still running on fixed-capacity infrastructure.
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