Muscle Nation’s $4 million Black Friday sale reached over 200,000 simultaneous visitors

When Nathan Anthony and Chris Anastasi founded Muscle Nation in 2016, they dreamed of combining their two passions: fitness and clothing. With their social media savvy and obsession with customer experience, the duo believed they had the formula for success. They were right. In its first year of operation, Muscle Nation achieved sales of $1 million, and in its fourth year, the company achieved more than $50 million in annual sales thanks to its more than one million followers on its social media platforms.

However, the journey from $1 million to $50 million wasn’t always easy. Muscle Nation, which started as a basic website with e-commerce integration, often struggled with website crashes and related sales declines. Since moving to Shopify Plus, Muscle Nation has enjoyed:

• $4 million was sold during Black Friday 2019
• Host 208,000 clients simultaneously – without site crashes
• Leveraging new upsell functionality to support successful $4 million holiday campaign

Challenge

Site crashed. Two words that strike fear in the heart of every e-commerce entrepreneur. But at first it was a constant nightmare for Muscle Nation.

“Our website crashed after only 80 visits,” says Anastasi. “We paid a developer to solve the problem and were initially very excited when our website could host 200 visitors. Unfortunately, shortly after the product was launched, the website crashed again.”

Anthony was similarly discouraged. “It was really depressing,” he says. “We worked until 3 a.m. before our launch to get everything ready, and then our website crashed after just five minutes.”

Muscle Nation needed a different solution – something that was scalable, reliable, and capable of all the customization needed to become a better business.

Solutions

When Anastasi and Anthony started looking for a new solution, they wanted something that offered more than just a stable website. “We started thinking about what else we wanted from an e-commerce platform,” says Anastasi. “We were interested in functionality, user experience and better checkout features.”

After talking to friends in the industry and looking at what products other successful e-commerce brands were using, the duo made their decision. “We had made a million dollars in sales at this point, so moving straight to Shopify Plus seemed like a natural fit,” says Anthony.

Muscle Nation has hired Shopify Plus solution partner Stead Lane to help with the migration. In just one month, Muscle Nation migrated to Shopify Plus with a more secure future in mind.

But there was room to continue to grow. Muscle Nation leveraged the Shopify Plus ecosystem of tools and apps to customize its e-commerce offering, using Shopify Flow to handle high-risk orders and customer tagging, Launchpad to handle product releases and event launches, and Peoplevox to manage inventory.

With so much website traffic and sales, Muscle Nation has also introduced an upsell feature that provides customers with small extras at a lower price, such as protein shakes and crisps, right at the checkout.

Results

Muscle Nation entered Black Friday 2019 leaner and meaner. It was ready to close the deal, and Shopify Plus was up to the challenge.

In a record-breaking holiday campaign, the company sold 78,600 units of goods in the first hour. By the end of the sale, 208,000 users had visited the site and rushed to purchase more than 154,000 units of product, representing a total of $4 million in orders.

In addition to the new ability to accommodate hundreds of thousands of site visitors at once, Muscle Nation’s Shopify Plus customizations have provided the company with a better experience for shoppers.

“The customer journey is the most important thing to us, and the Shopify Plus platform allows us to do that really well,” says Anthony, who notes that Muscle Nation’s upsell feature has been a “tremendous success.”

What is now is what will come next. When it comes to backend management, the ease of use provided by Shopify Plus has helped Muscle Nation scale even further, attracting new team members without complications.

“Shopify Plus makes collaboration easier for your entire team,” says Anastasi. “If our team members don’t have e-commerce experience, we can train them in half a day or less. The accessibility offered allows anyone to take ownership of specific areas of the site.”