FOSSIL

Fossil Group enhances ecommerce platform performance and security while saving over $1M annually with Cloudflare

Named one of TIME’s best brands of 2024, the Fossil Group creates stylish and functional watches, leather goods, sunglasses, and accessories. Their portfolio spans affordable consumer fashion and luxury goods, including brands like Relic, Diesel, Michele Watch, Skagen, and Zodiac.

The Fossil Group employs 5,500 people globally across the US, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Vietnam, and Hong Kong. They also have a network of 30,000 points of distribution across 140 countries — including 380 retail locations in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

Eliminating legacy shortcomings to optimize ecommerce platform performance and security

In 2020, Fossil extended their traditional brick-and-mortar retail operations into ecommerce, mobile, and social media. By 2024, their annual online revenue was over $600 million.

But their digital modernization journey was only just beginning. Several challenges affected their continued digital initiatives:

• A company-wide Transform and Grow (TAG) initiative calling for a $100 million IT spending reduction
• Sophisticated online threats — including bot attacks during high-profile sales events
• Costly and inefficient service from their incumbent web application security and content delivery provider, Akamai

Unfortunately, the third challenge exacerbated the previous two — slowing security incident response, hurting the customer experience, and increasing IT costs. According to Kevin Fabec, Fossil’s Security Director, their previous platform was “an archaic hodgepodge of disconnected functionality. The convoluted UI made it difficult to understand what security features we had available. It affected the edge security of our ecommerce platform.”

Mac Ganoo, Fossil’s Director of Global Salesforce App and Engineering, further described, “Service and response times were poor. It could take hours to open and days — sometimes weeks — to resolve a ticket.”

Eventually, Fossil decided to find a new platform to support their ecommerce future. “Faced with year-over-year cost increases without service or feature upgrades, we were more than ready for a change,” says Fabec. “It was time for an integrated, modern platform capable of scaling and supporting the performance and security of our high-traffic ecommerce platforms.”

Reducing costs, improving performance, and enhancing security with Cloudflare

Cloudflare provided the capabilities and scale Fossil required. Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud — a unified platform connectivity, security, and development tools powered by a global cloud network — is designed to help modernizing organizations like Fossil reduce complexity, risk, and costs across their digital environment.

“The value add was obvious — Cloudflare’s reduced cost and wide range of integrated services made committing to the new solution a slam dunk,” Fabec said.

Over eight weeks, Fossil replaced a range of Akamai services with Cloudflare’s web application firewall (WAF), bot management, client-side protection, and global content delivery network (CDN).

With the migration to Cloudflare, Fossil gained significant functionality while saving over $1 million in IT costs annually — an initial reduction of 40% plus future anticipated savings.

Boosting digital efficiency

In addition to reducing upfront costs, Cloudflare helped Fossil overcome longstanding pain points, such as unpredictable support and inefficient management associated with their legacy system. For instance, they no longer need to rely on costly support calls and weekly vendor check-ins to expedite slow resolution times.

Enhanced logging, alerts, and greater visibility into their ecommerce platform have also helped Fossil drastically cut mean time to resolution (MTTR) for network and security incidents.

“Gathering data, reporting an issue to Akamai’s engineers, and waiting for a fix used to take us around two weeks,” said Darren Boyer, Information Security Architect at Fossil. “With Cloudflare, we have access to better information and a lot more mitigation tools. Rather than relying on outside support, we can independently identify, triage, and address issues in 30 minutes.”

Consolidating disparate performance and security services onto Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud has also given Fossil a more intuitive UI. In the first six months since migrating to Cloudflare, the ecommerce team only had to open two support tickets; Fossil can now manage most of their security and content delivery services on their own.

“Cloudflare is much cleaner. It’s organized logically, so our engineers know exactly where to go to make changes and apply new configuration settings,” explained Boyer. “That promotes a sense of confidence in our security and content delivery services we didn't have before.”

Ganoo added, “Our teams can handle pretty much everything that comes up. We don’t have to escalate issues. We don’t need that endless back-and-forth. Cloudflare is a phenomenal improvement over navigating the Akamai jungle.”

And all of this efficiency has helped Fossil further reduce IT management costs. As Ganoo said, "Cutting the costs needed for all those extra support calls has brought the savings we see using Cloudflare closer to 50%."

Protecting ecommerce operations against automated attacks

Using Cloudflare application security services — including Cloudflare WAF and Bot Management services — has enhanced Fossil’s web application and API security in other ways. Leveraging threat intelligence and machine learning powered by the Cloudflare global network, Fossil prevents bot attacks, inventory hoarding, and credential stuffing incidents that, under the previous provider, degraded site performance and caused poor customer experiences.

“During our Star Wars collection launch, we had a massive influx of bot traffic that overwhelmed the site and prevented real customers from purchasing products — implementing security controls and limiting unwanted traffic was incredibly difficult with the old solution,” explained Boyer. “Now, with Cloudflare as the first line of defense for all our public web and ecommerce properties, everything is centralized, automated, and intuitive — we can see what's coming and mitigate threats in real-time.”

A central source of real-time data with a single control plane for threat mitigation, the cloud-native WAF gives Fossil peace of mind, especially during high-volume marketing and promotional events. Configurable firewall notifications alert the security team before threatening traffic reaches established thresholds. Cloudflare Advanced Rate Limiting ensures Fossil’s APIs, applications, and ecommerce properties are shielded from brute force and DDoS attacks while protecting the company from exposure to potentially costly traffic spikes.

Securing customers against client-side vulnerabilities and meeting PCI DSS 4.0 compliance requirements

Page Shield adds another layer of protection to Fossil's digital-first sales platforms, securing shoppers against malicious activity in their own browser windows. Part of Cloudflare’s suite of integrated security services, Page Shield harnesses advanced threat intelligence from the connectivity cloud to dynamically detect and help security teams neutralize malware, external scripts, and client-side vulnerabilities, including on third-party payment gateways.

“We had $120,000 earmarked for an external PCI DSS solution, not knowing Page Shield rolled into our service agreement,” said Boyer. “The solution aligned strategically with our compliance needs, and was another big Cloudflare win for us.”

Enhancing platform performance

After switching to the Cloudflare global network for content delivery, Fossil’s ecommerce sites showed reduced latency and a 20% improvement in page load speeds. With Cloudflare’s network architecture, services run on every server so traffic doesn't have to make extra hops when additional services like security are added on–everything is handled in a single pass. This architecture, combined with the breadth of the network totaling server facilities in 335 cities across more than 125 countries, the centrally managed, highly configurable Cloudflare network has improved the Fossil customer experience.

“With Cloudflare, we’ve seen a noticeable boost in performance — faster load times, smoother responses, and a seamless transition,” described Ganoo. “There are no downsides, just a better experience for our team and our customers.”

Integrated DNS and certificate lifecycle management

Managing DNS and certificate lifecycles across Fossil’s many online properties — including fossil.com, michele.com, zodiacwatches.com, skagen.com, and watchstation.com — was both complex and time-consuming. With Cloudflare, Fossil has streamlined these maintenance workflows, automating domain management, security, and encryption to improve visibility and reduce administrative overheads.

“We manage over 1,000 active web properties using Cloudflare,” said Boyer. “It gives us confidence that everything is secure and up to date.”

Based on their successes to date, Fossil plan to expand their use of Cloudflare solutions, exploring Cloudflare’s Zero Trust Network Access service as a pathway to retiring their legacy VPN.

“Our plans to upgrade our internal security and improve remote user access were another reason we chose Cloudflare over other vendors,” indicated Boyer. “It was important to select a vendor that had those capabilities so we can manage everything in one place.”

Over the course of the CDN migration and security upgrade, Cloudflare has become a trusted partner, helping Fossil lay a stronger foundation for a secure, efficient, and scalable digital future.

“Cloudflare made replicating our feature set easy,” Fabec noted. “It didn’t feel like they were trying to sell us something — it felt like they wanted to help us solve problems and make our transition as smooth as possible.”

“Regardless of where I go in my career, Cloudflare will be at the top of the deck when it comes to providing solutions for digital real estate,” he added. “With Cloudflare, we get what we asked for, and it costs what we expected. That’s the kind of partnership I value.”