Introduction
AWG is a well-established German fashion retailer, combining affordability with quality across a wide range of clothing for the entire family. With a portfolio of over 100 brands - including a strong private label assortment - more than 250 stores, and a loyal base of 3.5 million AWG Card customers built over more than 50 years, AWG has earned its place as a trusted retail institution in the German fashion market.
"Integrating Speed Kit into our shop was straightforward and low-effort on our end - exactly what you want when running a busy e-commerce operation. The team was highly responsive, easy to work with, and guided us through the process efficiently. Most importantly, the results lived up to what was promised: a measurably faster shopping experience for our customers."
Challenge
As consumer behavior continues to shift toward digital, AWG’s online shop has grown into a vital channel for reaching and serving its broad audience. In a competitive retail environment, page speed and seamless browsing are no longer secondary considerations - they are decisive factors in whether a visitor stays, engages, and converts. A slow-loading shop risks undermining the very values AWG stands for: reliability, accessibility, and outstanding customer service.
To uphold these standards online, AWG partnered with Speed Kit to deliver a noticeably faster and more responsive shopping experience - ensuring that the quality customers expect in-store is equally felt from the very first click.
Solution
AWG Mode operates a high-traffic fashion e-commerce platform running on Shopware 6. Serving a broad audience across Germany, with a strong loyalty base and a growing online presence. To further elevate the digital shopping experience across its storefront, Speed Kit was implemented.
By intelligently caching dynamic content and proactively preloading the most likely next steps in the customer journey, Speed Kit delivers near-instant page transitions and a seamless browsing experience - across devices and page types.
Core performance metrics such as Time to First Byte (TTFB) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) improved significantly across all page types. The result is faster page rendering, higher user engagement, and a digital experience that reflects the reliability and accessibility AWG stands for.
Speed Kit is an official ACE eligible technology partner and independent software vendor (advanced tier) of the AWS Competency Partner Program "Accelerate" as well as the Workload Migration Program. Our technology is powered by 13 different AWS services:
- Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS): We use EKS to schedule and orchestrate our Speed Kit applications on EC2 instances.
- Simple Storage Service (S3): Speed Kit stores cached assets in S3 buckets. Additionally, we store RUM (Real User Monitoring) and PI (Performance Insights) data in S3 buckets for analytics purposes.
- Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): Our workloads are hosted on EC2 instances, as managed through EKS.
- Kinesis Data Streams: Kinesis Data Streams are used to ingest RUM and PI data from Speed Kit, which is then consumed by Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink. Fastly also streams access logs to our Kinesis Data Stream, which are similarly consumed by Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink.
- Athena: We use Amazon Athena to query data stored in AWS S3 buckets, enabling performance insights and asset preloading.
- Elastic Container Registry (ECR): Docker images are stored in ECR and deployed in our Kubernetes cluster, which is managed by EKS. For third-party application images, we use the pull-through-cache feature of ECR.
- Elastic Container Service (ECS): We build Docker images using a service hosted on Amazon ECS.
- Route 53: Route53 is used to manage DNS records.
- Simple Email Service (SES): We use SES is used for sending transactional emails.
- Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK): We use MSK to facilitate consuming and producing custom event records for different applications.
- DynamoDB: Speed Kit uses DynamoDB to store information related to our predictive preload feature.
- Lambda: We use Lambda to pre-render client side renderd pages to make that actual server side rendered.
- ElastiCache (Redis OSS): We use ElastiCache to store our Bloom filter, which checks whether an asset is present in our cache.
-min.webp)
Click the image to open the architectual diagram of Speed Kit with AWS
Results
TTFB 90% Faster
Speed Kit achieved a 675 ms improvement in Time to First Byte (TTFB) across all enabled pages, making them 90% faster with Speed Kit. This dramatic reduction in server response time forms the foundation for the overall performance gains observed throughout the customer journey - from homepage to product page.
Median TTFB: 748 ms (Original) → 73 ms (Speed Kit)
LCP on Product Pages 65% Faster
Product pages - the most critical pages in the purchase funnel, saw an LCP improvement of 961 ms (Median), making them 65% faster with Speed Kit. This means customers reach the main content of product pages significantly sooner, reducing drop-off and supporting higher conversion rates.
Median LCP: 1,477 ms (Original) → 516 ms (Speed Kit)
Closing Statement
For AWG Mode, website performance is a direct expression of the brand’s commitment to its customers: making quality fashion accessible, easy to find, and simple to buy. By integrating Speed Kit, AWG has elevated the digital shopping journey from the very first interaction - delivering a fast, seamless experience that reflects the trust and reliability AWG customers have come to expect over more than 50 years.
With conversion rates, revenue, and page speed metrics all moving decisively in the right direction, the PoC results made a compelling case for a full rollout - and for Speed Kit’s role as a long-term partner in AWG’s continued digital growth.
