The Hydrow website serves their existing customers and prospects in two mission-critical ways. For their customers, the site is a portal into a world of recorded and live-stream workouts led by expert rowing coaches from beautiful locales. Just as vital, the site is their virtual showroom. Unfortunately, the management of their large acquisition-focused, imagery and video collection in an out-of-date tech stack, had become difficult and inefficient. Compounding matters, Hydrow suffered from slow page loads and poor core web vitals, both sales killers.
Hydrow saw core web vitals go from ranking in the bottom quartile to the top quartile, compared to competitors. Videos now stream faster through adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming, images load quickly, and Cloudinary seamlessly fits within Hydrow’s new tech stack, which was designed to deliver a high-performing composable commerce experience.
“We lacked an ability to tell our brand stories and leverage our strength in content,” said Reuben Kabel, SVP of Engineering at Hydrow. “We couldn’t iterate different treatments or ideas around prospect messaging, page structure, or marketing activation. We were limited in terms of velocity because of the technology footprint that we had.”
By integrating Cloudinary to automate media management, Hydrow’s developers have earned hours back in their days. Time they now use to focus on enterprise digital projects and explore new tools like generative AI.
Kabel said Hydrow’s team is working with more confidence since partnering with Cloudinary. The developers and creatives trust that visual assets in the library are up to date, and when it’s time to build a campaign or test a product display page, the components they need are there. “Pulling those assets together is now minutes of work, as opposed to weeks,” he said.
“For media and asset management, if you need to optimize front-end performance, Cloudinary is the best way to fire and forget,” said Kabel. “They handle your speed concerns and quality management.”
The full Hydrow case study is available here.
