Streamlining Imparfaite production releases with Platform.sh

Imparfaite, a marketplace for vintage women's apparel, relies on a steady stream of production releases to maintain its platform and roll out new functionality to its vendors. After several years on a variety of development systems, Imparfaite chose Platform.sh to improve speed, adaptability, and security. Given the company's needs, it made perfect sense to switch to this solution, explains Jérémy Laplanche, CTO of Imparfaite.

Imparfaite vintage clothing sold internationally

Clothing sold on Imparfaite is truly vintage, guaranteed to be at least 20 years old. Many pieces in the company's inventory date back to the 70s, 80s, and 90s. 

"We currently have 100,000 products, and 99.9% of those are unique," says Jérémy Laplanche, CTO. The company operates opposite to fast fashion. "Fashion is the second highest polluting industry in the world. Our company focuses on bringing very high quality, sustainable textiles back to the market."

“Our suppliers include professional or semi-professional sellers, thrift stores, and secondhand clothing wholesalers,” Jérémy continues.  “Our partners are located in France and Belgium exclusively, and our customers are 50% in France, 25% in Europe, and 25% in the United States. 

"We also have a physical resale site. One example is the Vintage Fair that Imparfaite holds a few times a year, where the platform's sellers showcase their selection to a large audience."

The marketplace also sells secondhand items to create a monthly and inspiring selection that is featured on the site. 

The technical challenge of fostering autonomy in the switch to Platform.sh

As a Platform.sh customer for one year, Imparfaite and its CTO wanted to "gain autonomy and flexibility, while lowering dev ops expenses." With no less than three projects at the end of 2022, another historic project, and many things to put into place, it took a solution that was both simple and agile to succeed, combining AWS and OVH.

In addition to the marketplace, other projects had to be migrated to Platform.sh. 

"We ultimately migrated a lot of small projects before moving the marketplace. We are currently working on a large project that involves tools for vendors, catalogs, and logistics."

Platform.sh offers the best solution for the pre-sales challenges facing Imparfaite.

• The marketplace has a large number of users: our customers. 
• Due to the sheer amount of items available for sale, Imparfaite must  accommodate many images. 
• Although most of Imparfaite’s customers are in France, its marketplace also receives visitors from an international audience. 

Image management and optimization

From day one, Platform.sh has offered Imparfaite an additional image optimization service on top of its CDN solution. This makes it possible to optimize images, which are often processed using server-side resources, with the help of the CDN. 

This lessens the load on the production servers and frees up space on the hard drive where the media files are stored. 

"In principle, only one file is needed, which the CDN optimizes instantly based on the specifications (resizing, enhanced photo quality, format conversion, etc.)," Jérémy explains. 

Not only does Platform.sh boost autonomy, it also improves performance and lowers the costs associated with managing image content.

A choice based on specific performance criteria

Imparfaite chose Platform.sh based on thoroughly developed criteria.

As Jérémy Laplanche explains: "We wanted an affordable French solution that would allow us to gain autonomy, independence, and ease."

The company now has a three-person team working in production, including a lead dev that the CTO brought over from his previous company. A younger developer joined the team recently, and Platform.sh has helped him to easily evolve. 

"He still needs some training, but he can already release a development environment with 2–3 configuration files for testing," Jérémy says. 

Launched directly on PSH, Imparfaite still needs to wait a little longer to be able to observe analytical trends and key indicators, but it has already gained peace of mind throughout the deployment. 

"In one of our last projects without Platform.sh, we experienced a bug that took me an entire morning to resolve, but that is unlikely to happen with Platform.sh," the CTO said. 

Support has handled about twenty tickets over the past year, which is just right for this ramp-up period!