C’est Normal is a direct-to-consumer (d2c) brand created and operated by Swedish-born influencer duo Jon and Janni Olsson Delér, together with Rickard Delér, Janni’s dad, and long time family friend Warner Nickerson.
“ C’est Normal (in French) means “It’s Normal.” And if you know us at all, you know how ironic this is. We never do anything the normal way, which makes C’est Normal a statement for a life worth living. It means setting extremely high goals, constantly pushing to make yourself better, and living the way you want to live rather than how people expect you to live. It is an expression of your view of the world and the knowledge we can change it.”
The loyalty of the C’est Normal customers is one of the highest we’ve seen in recent time. They communicate using Instagram and Youtube, all and all they engage with somewhere around ~3 million followers. The strategy is d2c and online-only by doing, what is referred to as, ‘drop’s, where they make a limited batch of clothing and sneakers available to ‘first come first serve’.
A limited batch of 20k items usually lasts between 60–120 seconds, during the first seconds we’re talking hundreds of sales orders per second. The amount of traction and FOMO-feelings these (brilliant!) entrepreneurs manage to generate is somewhat hard to grasp.
Historically this has been very challenging due to an under-performing eCommerce platform and payment provider where C’est Normal suffered everything from hard site crashes to payment gateway timeouts to name a few.
Brink Commerce operates in multiple cloud regions globally and for this particular case, we identified the importance of “being close” to our customer's target audience geographically. Every millisecond counts. We focused our efforts on central EU locations such as Ireland and Germany for cart creation and order processing.
Due to problems with timeouts from their previous payment provider we brought in our partner, Adyen, to make sure we were settling payments from within Europe but at the same time enabling C’est Normal to increase the number of localized payment options available to their customers.
“We didn’t really know how to react at first?! This is the first time we’ve ever done a drop without anything crashing” — Warner Nickersson, C’est Normal CEO
A successful ‘drop’ resulting in zero downtime and no payment gateway timeouts. Our commerce API reacted to the initial pressure from creating 5k carts and started to scale without any errors.
“For us, all of our launches have been like a space shuttle takeoff. And every time it feels like we are on Cape Canaveral watching it happen with everyone else, but this time, with the Brink team, it felt like we were in NASA mission control center.” — Jon Olsson, C’est Normal co-founder
0ms DOWNTIME
26k VISITORS
5k SHOPPING CARTS CREATED
4k CUSTOMERS
“Launch days are the scariest, hardest days of the year. We are all constantly worried our systems are going to blow up, give an awful customer experience, and leave us with months of work trying to solve all the problems. This expedite was totally different. Now we are actually looking forward to our next launch.” — Warner Nickersson, C’est Normal CEO
Stay tuned for more C’est Normal launch reports, the next one is planned for the end of June and it seems like they’re just getting started. Brink Commerce is super proud to be able to support fast-growing companies like C’est Normal.
If you want to know more and how Brink Commerce can enable your business to grow faster, reach out to us at hello@brinkcommerce.com
