Safe Catch Didn’t Have To Scale Back When Put In The Spotlight

Safe Catch is a company that produces tuna the safe way. The Californian company’s canned tuna has the lowest mercury of any brand as they are the only tuna company that tests every fish they catch.

The company’s founders Bryan Boches and Sean Wittenberg didn’t originally set out to build a canned tuna business. Rather, their initial offering was to do mercury testing for various companies. Before they came on the scene, the pre-existing technology only allowed them to do expensive purity tests.

Boches and Wittenberg wanted a cheaper and faster option, so they formed an engineering team and invented new technology to quickly test every fish for mercury. Every major seafood brand they offered the technology to declined their offer, and that’s when the idea for their own brand came about.

After a producer of the reality show Shark Tank was interested in Safe Catch’s product, Boches and Wittenberg submitted a video to get on the show. On November 4 at 9 p.m. on ABC, Sean and Bryan stood in front of six self-made entrepreneurs to present their brand, but one thing they didn’t have to worry about was their website going down.

As millions watched the Safe Catch founders pitch their product, there was a chance the website would experience an uptick in site visitors that could potentially lose tuna sales should the site experience downtime.

“We were unsure what needs we would have when our company was featured on Shark Tank. We weren’t quite sure what problems we would encounter when facing a huge spike in website visitors,” said Lead Designer Camille Matonis.

Luckily, the members of Safe Catch had the foresight to switch to a dedicated server with WP Engine. Before they were a WP Engine customer, Safe Catch experienced a site crash after a spike in traffic and didn’t want a repeat.

WP Engine gave them the IT guidance they needed to handle the Shark Tank traffic to make sure their ecommerce and page loading ran smoothly.

“WP Engine dedicated their time to monitoring our website the entire night after our Shark Tank episode aired. We really appreciated that!” said Matonis.

After switching to WP Engine, Safe Catch experienced a faster site that could handle their ecommerce needs. They even use our page load analyzer, Page Performance, to measure their site speed.

“Our site is now fast and functional. WP Engine has always been quick to answer our WordPress specific questions — especially related to caching,” Matonis concluded.

For more stories from WP Engine customers, check out our WP Engine Customer Spotlight page.