Big Cartel Blog

Seems we’ve been talking a lot lately about adding new members to our small but mighty team. Let’s all take a pause from our growth synergy (We’re using that word right, right?) and get to know our team a little bit better. We’d love to (re)introduce you to Lee, one of the highest ranking geeks on staff, and showcase a few of his favorite Big Cartel shops.

How long have you been with Big Cartel?

2 years, 2 months, 1 day, 10 hours, 18 minutes (give or take).

Finck: I love the way he’s integrated his BC shop with a third party hosting setup for a nice seamless transition. Good clean design, nice music and typefaces.

What’s been your favorite feature we dropped in the last year?

Not really a feature (sorry folks) but a massive behind the scenes upgrade. You may have seen our blog posts about moving to our own hardware. Aside from spending a lot of my time helping with that project it’s been one of the most satisfying projects of my career. The way the team pulled off the cross country move and the impact it has had on performance and reliability (particularly over the holiday shopping season) has been incredible.

Matt Richards Illustration: A coworker directed my attention to this shop. I’m no art critic but I love his pieces. Any attempt to adequately describe why would just have me fumbling for words. I can’t even choose a favorite there are so many great things here.

When you’re not holding everything together at BC, what do you do with your free time?

In the warmer months I play Ultimate Frisbee (“Frisbee” is a registered trademark of Wham-O Inc…) with a local league. When it gets cold I just overindulge on pie. I’m a father of 3 young daughters, so I’m inevitably getting my hair done or nails painted on a fairly regular basis. I have a passion for making, and love to learn new skills.

In the past I’ve undertaken a serious remodel of a portion of my home including; down to the studs demolition, structural modifications, electrical, plumbing, etc. I also made a wooden art easel for my girls, and a bunch of other small projects. I’m also an amateur pizzaiolo and am in the design phase of a project to build a wood fired pizza oven sponsored by the fine folks at Big Cartel.

Here we are again, another year down and we’re already so focused on 2013 that we almost forgot to reflect on how awesome this last year was. 2012 marks 7 years for Big Cartel, and, now that we’ve scratched that itch, we can comfortably settle in for the long haul. Here’s a rundown of how the year looked for us.

Growth

This year we surpassed 250K stores! To celebrate that milestone we brought lucky number 250,000, an artist from Boston, out to Salt Lake City for a special gallery show, and a grand opening of his online shop. It was a really special benchmark, and that perfect night made it even better. And while we’re feeling sentimental, take an early peek at the 250K buzz video we’ll be dropping later this month.

A quarter million stores means artists are selling stuff. Lots of it. All over the world. Big Cartel shops sold a combined $170 million worth of artistic, unique products. That means there’s an even larger group of people supporting the #ShopIndie movement, and for that, we applaud you. That worldwide audience is growing, and putting up some impressive numbers - here’s how BC shops are selling globally.

Evolution

2012 also saw some big upgrades to the Big Cartel platform, something we’re continually improving. We’re especially proud of a couple of our pet projects from this year: a sparkly new customization tool, and all of your order info brought neatly into the admin. These improvements set us up nicely for what looks to be a pretty epic 2013 - a year of better tools, new ways to sell, and a focus on educating artists on building and running an independent brand.

Team

To make all this possible, we’ve added a few to the fold. We’re now at an even 18, and all are settled in and feel right at home. Speaking of home, our office is done, decor’d, and warmed up for the cold Salt Lake City winter.

Thanks

A very special thanks to all of our wonderful artists on Big Cartel, and the massive legion around the world who support these independent brands. We work hard to put as much energy and passion into our business as you put into yours, and we look forward to 2013 being the best year yet for all of us.

Just like that, we’re now at 19 team members with the addition of Daniel Agee to our stellar support team. After a jaunt all ‘round the US of A, and we mean ALL around, Daniel’s landed himself in beautiful Rockaway Beach, OR. He’ll be sharing some of that sea-level serenity as he answers your emails and tenderly solves all of your Big Cartel problems.

Even though he’s just started, it seems as if he’s been here for years. We’ve all already got inside jokes and secret handshakes with him. So don’t be afraid to reach out, say hello, and welcome Daniel to the Big Cartel family.

This morning we experienced the largest downtime in recent years, and I wanted to personally apologize and explain what happened.

tl;dr - we had a database issue that didn’t alert our monitoring systems quickly enough, causing a few hours of intermittent errors and downtime.

So what happened?

At about 6:30am Eastern, we hit a threshold on the database table that holds all of our order and cart information. This made it impossible for new carts to be created, which caused intermittent errors on all of our stores.

On top of that, due to the unique nature of this issue, it prevented our monitoring systems from catching it and notifying our on-call operations team quickly enough to prevent downtime. By the time we were made aware of the issue, it had already been going on for several hours.

At about 10:00am we discovered the problem, brought the entire site offline to fix our database, and everything was online and back to normal by 11:15am.

What we’re doing to fix it

Getting so many orders it brings the site down may sound like a flattering problem, but it’s something we should have caught. Our orders database table has now been upgraded, and we’ve added close monitoring to the rest of the database to prevent similar issues in the future.

We’ll also be continually improving our overall monitoring systems to catch and notify us of any issue like this that prevents your store from working perfectly. The biggest time killer today was not knowing about the issue earlier, and we’re making sure that doesn’t happen again.

We’re truly sorry

We take our responsibilities to the artists who trust us with their store very personally, and days like today make our stomach hurt. Today we didn’t live up to our end of the bargain, and we’re truly sorry.

We take every moment of downtime seriously, especially during the holidays (luckily the Christmas rush had passed). No online service is perfect, and we have a pretty good track record, but we’re working day and night to strive for 100% uptime.

A special thanks

I want to give a special thanks to our own Anna Brozek. Anna caught wind of this issue on Twitter, rallied the troops to fix it, and kept our customers in the loop via Twitter and email during the entire outage. Because of her dedication to her job, even when she was off for the weekend, we were able to resolve things more quickly. Thanks Anna.

I also want to thank everyone who reported this issue to @bigcartel, and were so patient with us as we worked to fix it. We have the best customers in the world.

Thank you.

Matt
Co-Founder / CEO

We’ve gone and done it again, now we’d love for you to meet the newest addition to our Big Cartel design team, Nate Hanson. His roots are firmly planted in good ol’ Boise, ID, where he lives with his sweet wife and soon-to-be-born baby boy.

In between diaper changes and caffeine injections, Nate will be pushing pixels to add to our constantly improving design experience. The whole BC family met Nate this past weekend, and he’s already made himself an invaluable part of the team. Please raise your glasses, and join us in welcoming Nate.

A quick note about our server move almost 2 weeks ago - things went fantastically well. Better than we could have anticipated. All told, the site was down for only 14 minutes, and there were no major post-move problems. We’ve been watching things closely since then, and we’ve enjoyed much more stable performance and increased capacity to handle unexpected traffic spikes.

Already this new infrastructure is allowing us to make updates more easily and frequently, and with the busy holiday season almost upon us, we’ve never been better prepared to handle everything you can throw at us. Don’t forget you can now keep tabs on just how well the servers are doing, on our brand spanking new status page. We’ve got big plans for the future and this is just the beginning.

We’re constantly looking for ways to make the Big Cartel experience better. Today, we’re excited to highlight a small but powerful usability update to the admin: full keyboard control.

Built with accessibility and power users in mind, the store admin can now be used almost entirely without a mouse. Form fields, buttons, help tips, and even the main navigation can be steered through just by using the tab key on your keyboard. It’s a pretty slick way to cruise through your admin, and it’s already live. Everything from adding products to updating settings are now never more than a few quick key taps away.

As our army of Big Cartel stores continues to grow, so does our small but mighty team. Out of Boulder, CO, by way of the great midwest, Blake Walters joins our ranks as Big Cartel’s first dedicated front-end developer.

Like any good child of the 80s, Blake wore out his VHS copy of The Empire Strikes Back, played in a crappy ska band, then a less crappy punk band, and started building websites as a pre-teen. He took his skills to school where he actually learned to program, and then got a job to learn how to put it all together. Boy are we lucky he did, because he’s quite the asset to our team. Welcome aboard, Blake!

7 years old! Wow. A lot has changed since the early days with just our two founders bouncing ideas back and forth in a small room in Salt Lake City. We’ve grown to a team of 17 located all around the US, making Big Cartel run from day to day. Our servers have a new home, AND we’re now home to over 250,000 stores.

But what hasn’t changed, is what we do, and why we do it. We haven’t lost sight of helping artists make money doing what they love, and that ain’t half bad for 7 years in.

Our special gift to ourselves is a nod to all of the much-admired detail work that has gone into the products and stores and brands of the last 7 years. We put together this little video birthday present to commemorate it all, and next time we’ll remember the cake, we promise.

Working remotely absolutely has its perks, and we’ve enjoyed those for the better part of the last 7 years. A couple times a year, however, we get together in Salt Lake City at an undisclosed warehouse to brainstorm new ideas, talk ones and zeros, and shoulder hawk our way out of design problems. These bi-yearly indiefests or, Big Cartel-nivals, really kept our engines running, and made us realize how important it is to our product, and to our culture, to be together more often.

This last summer, we put the finishing touches on a small headquarters in the heart of the gallery district in Salt Lake City. It’s perfect for gathering the team to work through new ideas, or just providing a space to work when you really need a buddy to bounce ideas off of. We’ve already thrown our grand opening party, and hope to have plenty more events in the years to come.