How JetRails Helped a Legendary Fabric Retailer HandleSuper Bowl-Level Traffic with Confidence
Background
Mood Fabrics is one of the most iconic names in fashion and sewing, best known for its prominent role on the hit reality series Project Runway. For years, contestants on the show sourced their fabrics from Mood’s legendary New York store, making “Thank you, Mood!” a signature catchphrase. With locations in New York and Los Angeles, an expansive ecommerce site, and a loyal following of sewists, designers and DIY enthusiasts, Mood is a destination for anyone passionate about fashion and textiles.
Since 2021, Mood Fabrics has relied on JetRails for managed hosting on a scalable AWS Elastic Cloud environment, a platform that ensures flexibility, reliability and high performance for their ecommerce store and blog, ‘The Mood Sewciety.’
In early 2025, Mood approached JetRails with an exciting challenge: They had entered a contest with Google Gemini, with the potential prize of a Super Bowl commercial slot. With no way to predict whether the ad would air regionally or nationally, JetRails was tasked with ensuring Mood’s online presence could withstand a traffic surge of any scale, whether thousands or millions of visitors.
JetRails was tasked with ensuring Mood’s online presence could withstand a traffic surge of any scale.
The Challenge
The risks were significant. With its reputation and revenue on the line, Mood needed absolute confidence that its ecommerce store and blog would stay online, fast and fully functional, even if millions of potential new customers flooded the site after seeing the ad.
The preparation was complicated by the fact that no firm traffic projections were provided by Google nor the Super Bowl teams. JetRails had to plan for everything from a modest regional bump to a nationwide rush.
Assessment & Planning | JetRails’ Two-Phase Optimization Process
PHASE 1: Site & Code Optimization Audit
- Comprehensive caching analysis across server, database and browser layers
- Identification of inefficient extensions and unused code that could slow performance
- A full front-end theme audit
- Clear recommendations for Mood’s development team to apply
PHASE 2: Load Testing & Capacity Planning
- Multiple load simulations, including transactional tests that mimicked real shopper behavior — searching, adding to cart, and checking out
- Stress tests that modeled traffic spikes based on patterns from previous Super Bowl ads and publicly available ecommerce data
- Real-time tracking of database performance, caching efficiency, and site speed under load
- Detailed guidance for resizing all key infrastructure components, including web servers, databases, search services, and caching layers
As a final failsafe, JetRails also configured a “waiting room” feature, which could queue visitors if traffic ever exceeded infrastructure capacity, ensuring the site would never go completely offline, even in a worst-case scenario.
Load Testing | Key Test Highlights
JetRails’ load tests simulated a wide range of traffic conditions, preparing Mood for anything from a mild regional surge to an all-out national traffic wave.
January 16 Test
Simulated traffic peaked at 12,940 concurrent visitors, pushing database CPU utilization to 94%. This exercise provided critical insights into application-level performance under pressure.
January 30 Final Test
JetRails ramped traffic even higher, simulating a 49,270 concurrent visitor spike, with total simulated visits surpassing 1.3 million in a single day.
Testing hardware maxed out at 50,000 concurrent visitors, but the site itself still had room to handle more.
These aggressive tests let JetRails refine autoscaling thresholds and confirm the environment could handle more traffic than even the boldest projections
Super Bowl Sunday Performance
In the end, Mood’s ad aired regionally, rather than nationally. The result was a sharp but manageable traffic spike, well within the limits of the environment JetRails had prepared.
- Peak traffic reached approximately 40,000 concurrent visitors, far below the tested ceiling.
- Throughout the surge, site availability held steady at 100%, with no errors or slowdowns.
- Key processes like product searches, cart additions and checkouts performed smoothly, with no reported friction for shoppers.
“We’ve trusted JetRails with our hosting for years, so when this opportunity came up, we knew we were in good hands. They worked alongside our team to prepare for every scenario, even the ones that never happened. When the traffic hit, everything worked exactly the way it was supposed to, and we could focus on our customers, not our tech.”
Eric Sauma
Co-Owner
“Events like this are never just about infrastructure. You have to test the site itself — the code, the caching, the extensions — to make sure nothing cracks under pressure. We treated Mood’s site like it was going to be on the world stage, and that preparation paid off.”
Denis Zlatov
Customer Success Officer
Post-Event Optimization
Even after the Super Bowl, JetRails continues to optimize Mood’s environment, including a permanent upgrade to Graviton4 CPUs, providing faster performance and greater efficiency for future traffic peaks.
Lessons for Other Brands
Mood Fabrics’ Super Bowl preparation offers valuable lessons for any brand anticipating a major traffic surge, whether from a TV appearance, viral campaign or product launch:
- Start early. Performance reviews and load tests take time. Don’t wait until the last minute.
- Elastic cloud infrastructure is essential for rapid scaling. Traditional hardware can’t adapt fast enough.
- Stress test everything: not just the servers, but the entire shopping journey.
- Prepare for the upper limit, not just the average. Even regional campaigns can drive significant traffic spikes.
