Challenge: An Innovative E-Commerce Platform for an Innovative Seller
Hum wanted to build an online presence that took a whole new approach to nutritional supplement sales. Customers would advance through an interactive questionnaire that helps generate a set of supplements tailored to their personal health profile. Personalized nutritional supplements could then be recommended for sale based on a subscription model.
But Hum couldn’t find an off-the-shelf product capable of delivering this sort of capability in an integrated e-commerce solution. They brought in AspireLive to develop a solution and shepherd it through numerous stages of planned growth.
Solution: Personalized E-Commerce, at Scale
Over the first year of AspireLive’s engagement with Hum Nutrition, we worked together to transform their innovative idea-stage business model into a viable e-commerce platform. Hum Nutrition’s online questionnaire system is no sales tactic: subsequent questions are introduced based on conditional evaluation of each potential customer’s answers, providing subtle consideration of health risks and opportunities.
This platform has served as a powerful growth engine, and Hum continues to leverage AspireLive to support the continued evolution of their platform.
Based on insights gleaned from years of operational experience, AspireLive worked continuously with Hum to help refine their e-commerce infrastructure. Conducting overall project management using JIRA, our team re-architected successive versions of Hum’s platform to provide for improved performance, deeper functionality, and responsiveness to rapid growth. Major initiatives included adding the capacity for Hum to manage their own fulfillment and instituting a machine learning approach for evaluating customer health profiles—dramatically increasing the throughput of evaluations while saving human nutritionists for more nuanced judgement calls or “open field” customer questions. This machine learning technology is also utilized for fraud protection. AspireLive architected this solution using NodeJS supplemented by Python for the backend, with ReactJS used as the core of the front end.
As Hum’s business continues to grow, AspireLive remains an actively engaged technology consultant, moving into an overall advisory and architecture role as their business model matured. Hum’s growing business places new demands on their technology: a recent promotion from brand partner Sephora, for instance, resulted in as 13x traffic spike for Hum’s website. The AspireLive team implemented a Kubernetes cluster that brought the cloud’s seamless scalability to Hum’s ecommerce platform, a solution that’s able to handle the uneven demands of an impactful global retail presence. We support whatever features are needed by Hum’s growing operation, from integration with business intelligence tools like Heap, KeenIO, and Tableau to system backup and 12-factor security/encryption.
Benefits: A Global Brand with A Powerful Customer Engagement Platform
Hum Nutrition has turned their idea for a personalized nutrition e-commerce engine into a global brand that commands over $2 million per month in revenue.
When AspireLive was brought in, Hum was as a small startup with an innovative idea. Today, they’re a truly global brand: you can find Hum’s products at any Sephora counter.
Hum’s e-commerce platform doesn’t just handle the logistics of sales: it has functioned as a hugely valuable differentiator in a brutally competitive B2C nutrition industry.
