1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc. is a leading provider of gifts designed to help customers express, connect, and celebrate. The company has more than a dozen brands under its umbrella, including Harry & David, PersonalizationMall.com, and 1-800-Flowers.com. With its mission to deliver smiles, the company sends more than 30 million gifts per year. For this upcoming Mother’s Day, the company plans to deliver approximately 23 million floral stems.
When the e-commerce giant was planning for a technology transformation, they turned to LaunchDarkly to help them safely migrate their on-premises infrastructure to the cloud. Now as a customer for over a year, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc. utilizes LaunchDarkly to release more frequently, optimize customer experiences, and ensure availability.
Migrating to the cloud safely
The engineering team at 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc. needed to break their monolithic architecture into microservices and move from an on-premises data center to a hybrid cloud environment—without impacting their millions of customers. They used LaunchDarkly to roll out the new infrastructure to customers gradually. This helped to mitigate potential customer experience risks during the transition. In addition, the team employed a circuit breaker using a LaunchDarkly feature flag that enables them to instantly route traffic to a backup server in the event of an outage, further safeguarding against downtime.
Empowering business stakeholders
Before LaunchDarkly, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc. had a homegrown system that allowed them to turn features on or off for their specific brands using a database table. Functionality was limited, and it was only accessible to the engineering team. Without the ability to let product owners control feature targeting, it became increasingly difficult to manage experiences across their growing brand portfolio.
Adopting LaunchDarkly empowered engineering's business counterparts to control targeting and brand experience. Product owners can now manage exactly when, how, and to whom a feature is released and run A/B tests to determine which version of a feature is best. In turn, developers are freed to continue building important functionality.
Development cycles have also become faster and more frequent. Rather than having to wait for code to be tested before completing a feature, developers can deploy features as they are ready, and QA can test in production.
Moving faster with less risk
LaunchDarkly is now used across the front-end, back-end, fulfillment, and enterprise teams at 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc., and has helped the engineering organization standardize its release practices. By giving product owners control over customer experiences and saving developers time, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc. can continue to build its gifting destination as it inspires more human expression, connection, and celebration.
To read about how other customers are using LaunchDarkly, check out our case studies.
