Two Global Brands. One Kit Launch. No Margin for Error.
How Akoova Enabled a Leading Football Club to Achieve a Record-Breaking £8m Day with Zero Downtime
When a leading European football club unveiled its latest kit, this was no ordinary product drop. After years with one global sportswear giant, the club was switching to another global powerhouse – marking the end of one era and the beginning of another.
Partnerships between elite clubs and global sportswear giants are far more than just a contractual agreement. They define eras and shape cultural moments far beyond the pitch.
Fans weren’t simply buying a shirt. They were buying into history – a tangible piece of a new chapter in their club’s identity.
Millions had been anticipating this launch for weeks, eager to own not just the beautiful new kit but also a symbol of a new era.
The result? £8 million in sales. 18 orders per second. Zero downtime.
This was exactly why the club had chosen Akoova years earlier – their Adobe Commerce and Magento hosting partner for the moments that cannot fail.
The Challenge
The club had carefully prepared teasers and marketing campaigns that ensured anticipation was running at fever pitch. Past kit launches had attracted strong traffic, but everyone involved knew that this event would eclipse anything that had gone before. The only question was by how much.
Millions of fans rushing online at the same time would create unprecedented spikes in traffic, far beyond the limits of traditional infrastructure.
With the event marking a switch of official kit suppliers, the merchandising team first had to carefully remove the outgoing supplier’s range – adding to the complexity of this pivotal event.
Downtime during this kit launch was simply not an option. The business stakes were high: any outages, slow check-outs or failed transactions would have resulted not only in lost revenue but reputational damage on a global stage for two of the best-known world brands: the club and its new kit supplier. When two giants of sport and style come together, the spotlight is unrelenting – and nothing less than seamless execution will do.
Here’s what happened:
The Preparation
The club’s forecast was ambitious: 7,000 orders per hour – a 75% uplift on their previous record.
But this wasn’t a normal kit launch. There was no comparable event to benchmark against. The hype, the media coverage, the global anticipation – nothing in the club’s history matched it.
Akoova had been here before. Not this exact moment but under the same level of pressure. Black Fridays. Cup Finals. Title-winning seasons.
Peak trading is what the platform was built for.
The team analysed previous events, identified potential bottlenecks and load-tested against a mirrored production environment. Akoova’s platform doesn’t cap; it scales vertically and horizontally at every layer (Application, Database, Redis etc). So when the decision was made to prepare for double the forecast, there was no commercial negotiation. Just preparation.
By the day before launch, the infrastructure was ready. Now it was time to see what would actually happen.
The Moment of Truth
Real-world events rarely run without a hitch. The true test is in how your hosting partner responds to the challenges.
The holding page dropped. Traffic hit.
Within minutes, the database read replica’s CPU was approaching 100%.
This is the moment that separates hosting providers. With most, this is where the site goes down. Customers see error pages, abandoned carts, social media complaints.
Akoova’s team was already moving. Because K-Hosting is AWS-native, they could leverage Amazon RDS Aurora to horizontally scale the database read-replica in real time. No downtime. No firefighting. No customer ever knew.
The site stabilised within minutes.
Orders kept flowing: 18 per second.
Database Under Pressure
The spike at 09:00. Horizontal database scaling kicked in. No customer ever knew.
The Outcome
The club’s most successful kit launch. Ever.
£8 million in online sales
12,809 orders in a single hour – 84% above forecast
1.2 million sessions across the day
Orders from 150 countries
Home kit outsold the previous year by 700%
And the only number that matters most: zero downtime.
A Word from the Client
Your next big moment is coming
Whether it’s a product launch, a peak trading event or a Black Friday that cannot fail – the question is: Do you trust your hosting platform to deliver?
If you’re running Magento or Adobe Commerce on AWS, let’s talk.
Behind the Scenes
For those who want to know how the sausage gets made.
The Platform
Akoova’s K-Hosting is built on AWS-native architecture, with horizontal and vertical scaling as standard, including Amazon RDS Aurora for database scaling. It’s not a scramble when things get busy – it’s how we’ve operated for over a decade.
The Watch
On launch day, our Platform Team tracked every metric in real time – APM via New Relic, infrastructure via Datadog. Autoscaling was live, but the team was ready to intervene manually if needed. They did, and they resolved the database spike within minutes.
Application Scaling
18 nodes at launch. Scaled down to 8 as demand settled. No wasted spend.
Traffic Surge
Requests (ELB via Datadog)
From near-zero to 25,000 requests per second at launch.
Site Visits
From 25k baseline to 115k visits per hour at launch.
Application Throughput (New Relic)
Adobe Commerce (Magento) application performance during launch: throughput peaked at 40,000 requests per minute. Response times briefly increased under initial load, but orders kept flowing with near-zero errors.
The Efficiency
As demand settled, infrastructure scaled back down automatically.
After the dust settled, we ran a full retrospective – refining the playbook for the club’s next big moment.
