Initially, we were contracted to build a WordPress blog for the company in 2009. Over time, our responsibilities expanded to include developing and maintaining a Magento-based ecommerce site, serving as a primary contact for site integrations and technology partners, building internal web apps, supporting the internal design and marketing teams, and leading a small group of developers.

The Magento stack included a small cluster of load balanced web servers, a pair of replicated database servers, Amazon CloudFront CDN services, filtering and search powered by a Solr instance, memcached for session storage, Redis for caching, and a web application firewall provided by Incapsula. The production environment and infrastructure was monitored by New Relic and Sentry was used for front-end error tracking. We worked closely with Need’s hosting partner, Rackspace, to maintain the Magento production and staging environments as well as managed hosting for internal web apps and secondary sites.

In addition to our main responsibilities, we developed and maintained a variety of internal web apps and websites for Need’s secondary businesses. The Hub was an internal web app built on Laravel that facilitated receiving products, organizing photo shoots, entering ecommerce product data, and creating new products via the Magento API. It was initially integrated with NCR CounterPoint and later Teamwork Commerce. Additionally, we maintained the website for the Need’s biannual print magazine, Human Being Journal.

Over the nine years we worked with Need, we supported a variety of integrations. On the backend, those integrations included order management systems, inventory management systems, shipping and fulfillment systems, and fraud monitoring. On the front-end, we supported ongoing and seasonal marketing efforts, conversion optimization and A/B testing, and user experience monitoring. We also made efforts to contribute to the Magento ecosystem through submitting pull requests and bug reports to Magento technology partners, including the official Riskified and MailChimp modules.

Near the end of our time with Need, we were in the planning stages of a migration to a hybrid cloud production environment to allow for scaling, compiling a site style guide and design system to help streamline front-end development, supporting the merger of Need and luxury retailer Totokaelo under the Herschel Supply Co. backed NSTO parent banner, and building a standalone site for Need’s growing sneaker release campaigns.

Services

• Front-End Development
• Backend Development
• Ecommerce
• Integrations
• Technical Direction
• User Experience
• Information Architecture
• Systems Administration