How do you plan for Coachella + Mother's Day + Black Friday peak?
LA-DTC has more peak weekends than any other US city, each driven by a different vertical. Coachella (April) = festival fashion DTC peak (Revolve, FashionNova, Reformation), brands seed influencer tents and sales spike 30-50×. Mother's Day (May) = beauty + jewelry DTC peak, biggest weekend for Goop / Drunk Elephant / Ouai. LA Pride (June) = inclusive apparel + accessories peak. Coachella-adjacent music-fest season (Aug-Sept) for streetwear. Halloween (October) = costume + cosplay DTC. Black Friday + Cyber Monday (November) = universal. Christmas (December) = entertainment-merch peak (Disney, WB studios). Plus random Kardashian / Kylie drops throughout the year that can 100× traffic in 60 seconds. We build a war-room recipe: synthetic load test at 80× baseline two weeks before, Redis cluster + Varnish FPC smart-purge, queue-isolated checkout PHP-FPM pool, Stripe + Adyen tokenisation, read-replica DB for product browsing, Fastly or Cloudflare in front of Magento. Wildfire season (Jul-Oct) we also plan for, warehouse fallback to non-CA fulfilment.