Tradesy migrates and scales infrastructure to enable sellers to generate over $1 billion in revenue

Personal style is a journey, not a destination. The future of fashion is circular. Tradesy, as part of Vestiaire Collective, the leading global luxury and designer resale platform, has formed a community of fashion enthusiasts who are transforming the industry for a more sustainable future by promoting a circular economy.

“Global fashion and apparel industries are responsible for 10% of our greenhouse gas emissions,” says Tracy Dinunzio, Founder and CEO of Tradesy. “Younger generations are taking the initiative to reduce consumption and waste, shifting away from fast fashion, making big efforts to buy pre-owned items, and selling things that they’re no longer wearing. We’re saying goodbye to disposable fashion that is harming the planet.”

Tradesy was founded in 2012 as a marketplace for secondhand wedding dresses. Since then, Tradesy has evolved into the largest peer-to-peer (P2P) luxury resale platform in the US–selling designer handbags, shoes, clothing, and fashion accessories.

“With the lowest fees in the luxury category, our sellers earn more while Tradesy buyers pay less. We don’t take any inventory; instead, we do everything with advanced technology,” says Dinunzio. “Our marketplace connects buyers and sellers directly, replacing the middlemen to minimize the amount of shipping and handling and creating the smallest footprint for every item sold.”

Business challenge

Everyone is welcome to take a photo and upload their listing to sell on the Tradesy platform. Sellers can name their price, or they can use Tradesy’s algorithms to provide valuation recommendations. Once listed on the website and mobile app, potential buyers have the opportunity to negotiate a lower price by messaging the seller.

As the company evolved their business model to connect buyers and sellers to a much wider range of inventory and expanded the audience, Tradesy realized they needed to scale, modernize, and standardize their IT infrastructure in preparation for continued growth.

Jorge Documet joined Tradesy seven years ago and is now the Director of Technology Operations, responsible for infrastructure, supporting the platform, monitoring applications, and ensuring DevOps engineers can develop efficiently and deploy code changes to production. As the Director of Technology Operations, it is Documet’s responsibility to meet these IT challenges and move Tradesy’s platform into the future.

Solution

Documet and his team at Tradesy conducted an architecture review of their platform and determined the best approach for their IT infrastructure would be to migrate it to a containerized environment. This type of management and workload orchestration system of clusters would run in public cloud services and allow developers to move applications faster and easier from one environment to the next. “With the ultimate goal of moving all our virtual machines (VMs) to containers, we looked directly at Google Cloud since they pioneered Kubernetes and have an impressive ecosystem,” says Documet. 

Google Cloud introduced Tradesy to SADA, a multiple-time Google Cloud Sales Partner of the Year. SADA proved a successful match.

We were immediately on the same page with SADA. SADA’s team understood what we wanted to achieve and had the expertise to provide the necessary support and guidance.

Jorge Documet | Director of Technology Operations at Tradesy

To begin, SADA completed an extensive infrastructure audit and delivered a recommended project plan. The first migration step involved moving Tradesy’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) from Akamai to Google Cloud CDN. This tool uses Google Cloud’s globally distributed edge points of presence to cache external HTTPS load-balanced content close to end users. 

Then the data pipeline team migrated their MySQL and Postgres databases from Amazon RDS to Cloud SQL and their Redshift data warehouse to BigQuery while the DevOps team moved its local and QA environments from AWS to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). “With these services in place, we had the confidence and knowledge for our final step in migrating our production release and full web traffic to GKE,” says Documet. Tradesy is also implementing other Google Cloud solutions such as App Engine, a cloud platform as a service for developing and hosting web applications in Google Cloud-managed data centers, and Cloud Storage.

Results

Tradesy immediately experienced significant cost savings between 30% and 40% and improved efficiencies and ease of use for its end users by migrating to Cloud CDN.

Our vision was fulfilled. We got a lot of synergy from a variety of products when SADA helped get us fully onboarded into Google Cloud. Although it took some time and energy to refactor applications, at the end of the day it was worth it. Primarily because we no longer have to manage our underlying infrastructure.

Jorge Documet | Director of Technology Operations at Tradesy

Migration to Google Cloud has enabled Tradesy to spend less time monitoring architecture performance and more time focusing on delivering value to its users. With SADA’s help, Tradesy was able to complete the migration of  its image mappers and production environment from AWS to Google Cloud and scale its infrastructure to meet growing demand. 

Tradesy is committed to confronting climate change, encouraging sustainable practices, and shifting consumer behavior from retail to resale. By recirculating pre-owned luxury goods, Tradesy reduces demand for newly produced fashion while empowering customers to build a high-quality wardrobe for less. 

Tradesy sellers have grossed over $1 billion in revenue, with millions of designer fashion items sold on its platform.