From streamlined operations, to global performance views, this home goods retailer is taking the industry—and its data analytics—by the reins
When Snowe first stepped onto the scene in 2015, high-quality home goods were mostly out of reach for the everyday buyer—save for the every-so-often guilty splurge. Since then, this renegade retailer has upended the industry on the principle that quality goods shouldn’t cost a fortune. From Italian-made linens, to porcelain dinnerware direct from Portugal, Snowe has helped thousands of people channel their inner design gurus to nail the perfect dinner party or cozy night in.
By 2019, Snowe had taken the home goods world by storm, and as the company steadily grew in popularity, so too did its staff (by a whopping 50%!). Unsurprisingly, this employee growth brought with it some growing pains: the brand attempted to juggle the challenges of an overwhelming amount of data, disconnected sources, and too many tools to effectively manage it all.
Forced to cobble together makeshift solutions to keep things moving along, the team at Snowe turned to Excel and Google Sheets, and then to MS Access. While initially these manual data reporting mechanisms worked, they could not scale with the company’s growing needs, and the team was burdened with laborious, time intensive processes.
Worse yet? Other more helpful solutions on the market posed more problems than they solved with sky high prices and baseline requirements of advanced SQL knowledge.
They needed a cross functional platform that could help extract meaningful insights from their data while providing company-wide utility and transparency—and one that wouldn’t break the bank. That’s when they turned to Looker for help. After explaining their specific use case to the account team, the folks at Looker knew the combination of their BI interface and Daasity’s data analytics platform was the perfect fit for Snowe.
With hands-on help to get them started, the teams at Daasity and Looker worked together to synthesize the unique blend of looks and integrations needed. Within weeks, the data landscape was looking a lot different at Snowe. With the right tools in place, the team now had a solution to manage their data with powerful functionality that allowed them to drill into the details without needing a data scientist.
Better yet? Freed up from the heavy lift of manually pulling and analyzing their data and using disparate tools to accomplish it, Snowe now had a single source of truth that the entire company could leverage that was also saving them an incredible amount of time.
Even with only a few members of the team actively manipulating data in the Looker platform, Snowe estimates that their staff is saving more than 15 man hours per week, totaling nearly 750 for the entire year—at minimum. You know what they say: ‘time is money’, and that’s most definitely the case here. With their attention now focused on strategy vs. manual analytics, the team is now able to spend time on key business drivers like overall company health and cash flow.
Providing global views of company performance was an expected perk of an ideal-fit data analytics solution. What the team at Snowe didn’t realize is how Daasity and Looker could help solve acute challenges as well. From helping to crackdown and mitigate credit card fraud during the high stress environment of Black Friday Cyber Monday, to perfecting the titration of choosing a shipping cost that that would help save their bottom line, data is making a world of a difference for Snowe:
After noticing a concerning trend of gift card purchases during the holiday season, the team built a dashboard to analyze this significant increase. By looking at sales distributions over time, Snowe quickly realized that these purchases weren’t being made by the same customer, but still revealed an unsettling pattern that looked a lot like credit card fraud. With the cross functional capabilities of the tool, the team was able to seamlessly filter and funnel the data while setting an automated alert for their customer-facing teams. This flow helped them to effectively crack down on the problem. In just a few days, Snowe, as well as their customers, were able to avoid thousands of dollars in credit card fraud.
Snowe was founded on the idea that cost should never be a limiting factor in living a life you love. That’s why they offered their customers free shipping—no matter what. Noble in its ideal, this model was taking a toll on their growing business. They knew they needed to make a change, but didn’t want to put the brunt on their customers. What to do? Look at the data of course. Shipping home goods isn’t cheap, but without visibility into the gross billable weight of their products (a feature that isn’t offered in most integrations) the team was flying (and shipping) blind.
What would have taken several weeks of analysis, took just two weeks to determine that an adjustment of $5 in shipping charges would change the game. Now, Snowe is happy, and their customers are, too. It’s estimated Snowe is able to add around 30% of shipping costs back to their bottom line in 2020 alone.
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