Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend is a pivotal moment in the retail calendar—in 2023, Shopify merchants achieved a record $9.3 billion in sales over the weekend.
Yet success during these peaks isn’t only defined by new products or steep discounts. Site speed and performance is critical for ensuring the website is sufficiently stable to process high volumes of visits and checkouts.
Peaks like Black Friday and Cyber Monday can see stores receive massive surges in traffic. Without the right platform, these unpredictable spikes can cause severe website performance issues. And just half a second of delay can damage customer experiences—ultimately hammering conversions and sales at a critical moment.
That’s why it’s vital that brands are prepared for peak. They need assurance sites will remain ultra responsive, even as they pull in record audiences. Shopify offers customers that assurance with the world’s fastest stores, rendering up to 2.4x faster than other platforms.
Represent, the luxury fashion label, is one of those businesses. Powered by Shopify, Represent handles a 25x increase in traffic and an 8x boost in conversions on Black Friday—and it does it all without missing a beat.
Represent’s rapid growth
Performance has been a core element of Represent’s brand since it was born. Brothers George and Michael Heaton launched Represent in 2011, starting by selling a limited number of screen printed t-shirts with bold graphics inspired by West Coast streetwear.
Even with these humble beginnings, the vision was always big—George Heaton, Co-founder and Creative Director explains, “We focus on the best. We’re here to deliver the best product. The best service. The best quality.”
Today, Represent has made that vision a reality: it’s fast approaching £100 million in revenue, fueled by a relentless focus on quality, fresh designs, and bold new product lines. It’s also created a truly global community, supported by a mastery of the art of the drop—making every new collection a moment of hype, creativity, and passion for its fans.
Behind the scenes, Represent’s success is also driven by bringing that focus on being the best to their digital infrastructure. As Stefan Lewis, Chief Digital Officer explains, “As much as Represent has been about our brand, from an ecommerce point of view, we’ve also always had a keen focus on core web vitals.”
Powering Represent to new heights
Shopify has been powering Represent’s stores since 2013, and since then has worked closely with the brand to ensure performance is always up to the meticulous standards Represent and its customers demand.
The current set up includes four localized websites and four localized apps. By using Shopify Markets, the business can easily localize languages, offer payments in a range of currencies, and integrate with relevant shipping systems dependent on location. This has had a huge impact on overall business performance—with the German translation instantly adding 30% to conversion rates.
Meanwhile, Stefan explains that working with Shopify has meant the stores are always ready for sales peaks—whether around a new drop that the Represent community is hyped for or a peak season sale.
“We’ve always been able to proactively forecast and work with Shopify ahead of new launches,” Stefan explains. “Shopify has always helped us in terms of increasing bandwidth and we’ve never run into any issues around site speed,” he adds. This focus on performance is vital when research shows a delay on page loading times of just 1-3 seconds will increase bounce rates by 32%.
Making Black Friday even bigger
“Black Friday has always been part of our DNA—it’s a big part of the overall strategy,” Stefan says. The company sees site traffic skyrocket by 25x and conversions rising by 8x, “It’s a really powerful moment for the brand.”
This Black Friday, those figures may rise even higher as Represent has something special planned. Alongside a sale with exclusive offers for members of the community, Represent will be launching a collection that includes what Co-founder and Creative Director, Mike Heaton, describes as his “favorite piece yet”: a garment inspired by his sketchbooks, featuring over 50 artworks.
With regular product launches spiking traffic by 30%, a significant peak around this launch and the Black Friday sale is all but guaranteed. Yet rather than worrying about the impact on page load times, Represent’s team can focus on delivering an incredible customer experience with the confidence that performance will remain ultra-responsive.
When it comes to ecommerce performance the data doesn’t lie—the quicker the better. Thanks to the fastest server speeds in commerce, Shopify will be ready to keep Represent’s sites running smoothly no matter the demand. And as Represent continues to create bigger and bigger peaks, Shopify will be accelerating right alongside them.
“I think one of the beautiful things about working with Shopify since 2013 is that we as a business have not sat still—and equally, Shopify has had the same mantra.” Stefan Lewis, Chief Digital Officer, Represent
Visit the Shopify Site Speed Calculator to learn more about the value of site performance and get an audit of your site speed.
