Case Study Ruby on Rails Migration Enables Composable Commerce Platform to Rapidly Scale

$58M+

Venture capital raised

217

Product releases per year

10M+

Monthly site visitors

The Opportunity Overcoming Codebase Limitations to Keep Up with Customer Demands

Teespring, rebranded as Spring, is a social e-commerce platform that revolutionizes how individuals and businesses create and sell custom merchandise. They empower designers, influencers, and entrepreneurs to bring creative ideas to life by enabling them to design and sell custom apparel, accessories, and home decor products through a crowd-sourcing model.

The platform offers a user-friendly interface that allows creators to upload their designs, set prices, and create custom product listings. Spring then handles the entire production and fulfillment process, including printing the designs on high-quality products and shipping them directly to customers worldwide, providing a risk-free opportunity for creators to monetize.

Amid rapid success, their small engineering team strove to keep up with customer demands and deliver new features and functionality. However, their existing codebase was not primed for meteoric growth. Determined to surmount this hurdle, Spring decided to migrate from PHP to Ruby on Rails. Still, they needed seasoned RoR developers who could swiftly execute the migration while steadily rolling out new features.

Our Response Quickly Tackling Technical Debt with Legacy Migration and New Feature Development

Recognizing the need for speed, Spring sought MojoTech’s expertise to address their technical challenges head-on. They were grappling with the consequences of technical debt, which hindered their ability to make incremental releases without inadvertently introducing bugs elsewhere within their system. Aware of our track record in tackling similar issues, where simultaneous migration, technical debt cleanup, and new feature development were required, Spring entrusted us with developing the composable commerce architecture of their new Ruby on Rails codebase.

Working across two teams, we embarked on a mission to migrate Spring's existing PHP codebase to Ruby on Rails while building new features on the revamped platform. Initially, our team comprised five engineers, supported by a skilled Product Manager. As we established a clear roadmap, our team grew rapidly, more doubling over time.

This expansion enabled us to execute parallel work streams. One team focused on the migration process, meticulously transferring the PHP codebase to the robust Rails framework. The remaining team members collaborated to define and develop innovative features while scaling their production environment on AWS to meet Spring's escalating growth demands.

Spring also faced challenges prioritizing work to ensure the right initiatives received the necessary focus at the right time. MojoTech was pivotal in implementing an agile process that emphasized maintaining a balanced and well-prioritized approach across all initiatives. By establishing efficient workflows, we enabled Spring to navigate their development tasks with agility and precision, ensuring that their resources were allocated optimally to progress.

The Outcome Achieving the Scalability Necessary to Expand Globally

Through our partnership, Spring achieved the ability to develop new features and enhancements, free from the scalability issues that plagued them previously. This collaboration entailed a comprehensive overhaul of their codebase, establishing efficient prioritization processes and creating internal tools that significantly improved user experience and customer service. As a result, the investment made by Spring in these initiatives paid off exponentially.

"MojoTech was the difference between us being able to maintain a tremendously fast growth rate and completely falling off the horse. They've built tools that allowed us to sustain a growth rate of several hundred percent."

Sharon Burt

Director of Internal Products, Teespring

Spring's accomplishments gained interest from the industry, culminating in a staggering $58 million in venture capital secured, with notable contributions from renowned powerhouses Khosla Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. Buoyed by this success, the company relocated to the thriving hub of Silicon Valley and forged a partnership with the NFL.