Moving fast, making customers happy with CircleCI

The Challenge

To help e-commerce companies compete for customers and sales, BRIKL builds 3D customization tools to be shared online, so customers can create their own designs — like custom athletic gear. The BRIKL platform also includes e-commerce features such as website and online shop builders. Since the company’s founding in 2019, its goal has been to move quickly to ship new features to customers, explains Tobias Meixner, co-founder and CTO of BRIKL.

“From the beginning, we knew we needed a tool that we could deploy quickly because we needed to move fast,” Meixner said. “We wanted to test the market and try things out, even before we had a product available. That was the way we started out, and we’re still like that today.”

The speed at which the company’s developers like to work helps BRIKL maintain strong separation between its frontend teams, which build out apps and the storefront solution, and the backend teams, which manage APIs and databases.

The Solution

BRIKL started using CircleCI on day one. With CircleCI, the BRIKL development team had solutions at hand to integrate with GitHub. For its frontend teams, BRIKL can run unit testing and basic validation of its source code, including linting, rules alignment, and Cypress testing for its staging and dev sites. For its backend teams, BRIKL uses CircleCI to simplify bundling and deploying, as well as testing pipelines on every pull request.

“With CircleCI, we have the confidence of knowing that every customer experience is covered,” Meixner says. “Every update we make is covered by the CI/CD pipeline. We can share a preview link with customers, for example. CircleCI gives us the ability to make sure every pull request or commit, no matter the environment, is covered for the backend and the frontend.”

Why CircleCI

Customer satisfaction drives every build done by BRIKL today and also drives the company’s plans for future growth. That’s why BRIKL developers rely on CircleCI for fast, reliable continuous integration and delivery. The company plans to expand its development team to manage the workload for new features, like making the platform available for team stores. BRIKL is also working with enterprise customers that want customization, which means that builds will become larger, Meixner says.

“As we evolve, our build pipeline will become more complex,” Meixner says. “Our requirements are changing as we grow, which means the challenge is to stay stable. We’ll invest more time into performance testing so we make sure everything we deploy is of consistent quality, and CircleCI will be a part of that process.”

“CircleCI helps us optimize how we’re testing today so we can identify issues early on, which plays a big part in our customers’ happiness.”

Tobias Meixner
Co-founder and CTO at BRIKL

About BRIKL

BRIKL is a leading provider of 3D configurator software for cycling, triathlon, football, swimming, basketball, hockey, soccer, and rugby gear. BRIKL helps brands, retailers, and manufacturers sell custom team wear, sportswear, promotional wear, sports equipment, packaging, and any other customizable product online.