Caylent Services
Infrastructure & DevOps Modernization
Quickly establish an AWS presence that meets technical security framework guidance by establishing automated guardrails that ensure your environments remain compliant.
Lifestyle Brand Transforms E-Commerce Operations with Serverless Architecture, Reducing Order Failures by 99.98%
Infrastructure & DevOps Modernization
At a glance
Stance partnered with Caylent to migrate from a struggling low-code integration platform to a fully serverless, event-driven architecture on AWS. The transformation delivered immediate business impact: order failures dropped from 15% to 0.003%, operational costs decreased by 50%, and customer service teams now save 5-7 hours every week. With improved visibility and scalability, Stance can now resolve issues proactively before customers are affected, giving internal teams more time to focus on AI-driven innovations that enhance the customer experience.
Spreading Excellence Across Digital Products
Stance was originally set up as a sock company, but has since aimed to spread that same excellence across the rest of its product line, including its digital products and e-commerce infrastructure. Founded in 2009, Stance has earned a reputation for its unique and stylish socks that combine comfort, functionality, and artistic expression. The brand offers a wide range of sock styles for men, women, and kids, including casual, athletic, and performance socks, and even licensed collaborations with popular brands, artists, and athletes.
As the brand grew to serve customers in over 40 countries with millions of orders annually, the complexity of managing retail operations and logistics through multiple third-party SaaS vendors became a significant challenge. The company initially chose a low-code integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) solution to coordinate between various SaaS services for its e-commerce store. While this decision was intended to simplify integrations with minimal manual coding, Stance encountered critical business challenges that opened the door to exploring an AWS foundation.
Problem
One of Stance’s biggest hurdles was gaining system visibility to identify and address issues before customers experienced them. The low-code iPaaS platform created several critical business challenges.
Their team lacked visibility into its workflows, making it difficult to find error logs, troubleshoot failures, and pinpoint where issues were occurring. Without proper visibility and observability, problems were often detected through manual efforts or customer complaints.
Order processing failures became a significant burden. Approximately 15% of customers were affected by system issues. Orders frequently failed to bill, occurring anywhere from once to 50 times per week. During one holiday season, 17,000 orders became stuck in a batch processing nightmare. The orders required manual processing which took two weeks, causing delays in shipping during a critical sales period.
Manual intervention was required constantly to reconcile orders from third-party systems. This was a significant burden on the customer service team, with 5–15 stuck orders requiring attention daily. Many processes were time-consuming due to lack of automation. To maintain positive customer experiences, Stance's customer service team was frequently giving away free apparel to salvage relationships—an unsustainable approach.
An additional challenge was vendor lock-in. Maintenance of the low-code solution was heavily reliant on a single contractor, which led to a bottleneck when work needed to be completed. There were also gaps in the offerings of other vendors, which limited Stance's ability to develop new features, slowing down the development process and hindering customization.
“Previously, about 15% of customers were affected by issues; now that number is around 0.003%. We fix problems before customers even notice.”
Matt Ray
Enterprise Architect
Solution
The benefit of partnering with Caylent really comes down to having AWS expertise across the entire ecosystem. It gives Stance insight and the ability to explore what they're able to do in the future.
What Stance really needed was an approach that provided visibility—something that could be built in a way that delivered observability, so even someone non-technical could go in and fix issues. The solution Caylent brought to Stance involved designing, building, and eventually helping implement a system that could then be monitored directly by the Stance team.
Caylent designed and built a fully serverless, event-driven architecture on AWS. Major processes were broken down into separate workflows, ensuring efficiency and event-triggered processing wherever possible. This solution allowed the system to scale horizontally to meet demand, as opposed to the previous system's reliance on vertical scaling.
Caylent designed, built, and implemented the architecture using the following AWS Services:
- AWS Step Functions – A powerful orchestration service that manages workflows as state machines. This provides visibility into underlying processes and enables real-time monitoring of each step's execution, making it easier to pinpoint errors and exceptions.
- AWS Lambda – A serverless compute service that runs code without provisioning or managing servers, creating workload-aware cluster scaling logic to maintain event integrations or manage runtimes.
- Amazon API Gateway – RESTful endpoints enabling communication between systems and third-party services.
- Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) – Message queuing for asynchronous request handling and self-throttling mechanisms to manage connection limits with third-party providers.
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) – Scalable object storage for data and file management.
- AWS Transfer Family – Secure file transfer capabilities for integration workflows.
- Amazon CloudWatch – Structured logging with alerts forwarded to Datadog for comprehensive monitoring and observability.
- AWS Organizations – Multi-account structure with separate environments for production and testing using AWS best practices.
- AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) & CloudFormation – Infrastructure-as-code for consistent, repeatable deployments automated through CI/CD pipelines.
By structuring workflows as state machines with AWS Step Functions, Stance gained the visibility that wasn't possible with the previous low-code solution. The heightened transparency facilitates prompt troubleshooting and permits seamless retries of failed steps. With state machines, even non-technical stakeholders can now resolve and redrive failed executions directly from the AWS console.
The architecture also addressed a critical challenge with third-party connection limits. By segregating requests into synchronous and asynchronous types—with asynchronous requests handled through SQS with self-throttling—the system minimizes errors and maximizes throughput without requiring expensive contract upgrades.
Business Impact
The implementation of AWS brought significant improvements and positive impacts to Stance. Previously, about 15% of customers were affected by issues; now that number is around 0.003%. Stance fixes problems before customers even notice, so they no longer see those contacts on the customer service side.
The reliability of the system dramatically improved, with the failure rate of sales orders dropping to an impressive 0.003% on AWS, compared to the previous platform's failure rate of 1.5%. The number of stuck orders was reduced from 5–15 per day to 0–1 failure per week.
One immediate benefit was the reduction of sales order failures, enabling the customer service team to save roughly 5–7 hours per week per customer service manager, allowing them to focus on more strategic tasks.
Since transitioning to AWS, Stance has not encountered a single instance of failed billing—compared to the previous system where this occurred anywhere from once to 50 times per week.
With AWS, orders are now architected to process individually rather than in batches, eliminating the batch processing nightmares that previously caused major delays during critical sales periods.
The cost efficiency of running the system on AWS was also evident, with a roughly 50% reduction in costs compared to the previous platform. Vertical scaling challenges were overcome, eliminating the scaling issues previously faced. When traffic subsides, the system's ability to scale down results in additional cost savings.
Caylent and Stance are continuing to collaborate on forward-looking initiatives that explore AI modeling, automation, and data-driven insights. These efforts aim to drive business growth while delivering an even better customer experience.
