Removing the Infrastructure Tax From Peak-Season Retail
For KIKO Milano’s ecommerce team, Black Friday used to be an operations marathon. Weeks ahead of the event, engineers manually scaled AWS EC2 instances and tweaked application configuration to accommodate expected traffic. The process was fragile: if demand exceeded forecasts, the site could slow or fail exactly when revenue was on the line.
After moving the storefront to Vercel, that manual prep disappeared. The team now spends the days before peak traffic shipping campaigns and running tests instead of provisioning servers, and the change has cut roughly three weeks of annual Black Friday infrastructure work while reducing build times by 75%.
From War Rooms to On-Demand Capacity
KIKO’s previous infrastructure ran on EC2 instances sized for normal conditions, with scale-out handled by hand before each peak window. The cycle started two to three weeks before an event and had to be reversed afterward. It involved more than server capacity: scaling required application-side changes, and the company stood up dedicated chat channels and conference rooms to triage performance and downtime during the rush.
The operational overhead had a direct business cost. Slow navigation and unstable pages made purchases difficult, and the team knew that at any moment, a failure could take the store offline. The primary goal of the migration was to stop treating traffic spikes as a risk to manage and start treating them as a routine part of running an online store.
Deploying Daily, Scaling Automatically
The shift to Vercel changed the team’s workflow from preparation to execution. Antonino Samperi, Digital Solutions Specialist at KIKO Milano, described the difference in release frequency:
“Before we had to limit the number of releases as much as possible, but on Vercel we have the ability deploy multiple times a day if we want.”
Antonino Samperi Digital Solutions Specialist
The old CI pipeline took around 20 minutes to complete, which forced the team to batch releases. On Vercel, builds average under four minutes even with multiple locales and a large catalog of pre-rendered pages, and the dashboard’s deployments view centralizes build status so failures surface without digging through logs.
The legacy environment also had a fixed number of shared environments for dev, test, pre-prod, and prod work, which created a bottleneck for parallel projects. Samperi described provisioning on Vercel as “snapping your fingers,” including spinning up new environments on the fly. Cloning environment variables is fast, and changes that once required code edits now often just need a redeployment.
Traffic-dependent performance was another pain point. On Vercel, the Next.js application splits static delivery, cached pages, and dynamic compute so each layer scales independently during spikes, removing the need to size servers in advance. As Samperi put it:
“On Vercel, infrastructure is something we were finally able to forget entirely, and that’s priceless.”
Antonino Samperi Digital Solutions Specialist
Weekly Savings and Ongoing Confidence
The benefits extend beyond peak season. Samperi estimates the platform saves the team nearly a full day of work per week once all friction is accounted for. That newfound capacity translates into faster shipping and greater confidence in the underlying platform.
Part of that confidence comes from the vendor relationship itself:
“It’s not only technical that the platform works, but also the people that are behind it. We never felt abandoned.”
Antonino Samperi Digital Solutions Specialist
KIKO Milano is a global beauty brand selling cosmetics through its ecommerce site to customers worldwide.
