The Company
The Latest Scoop is a Vancouver, CA-based boutique rooted in the unique model of a pop-up shop. Deb Nichol, The Latest Scoop’s founder, was inspired to create the concept as a way to refresh a retail landscape that had become boring and typical.
The Latest Scoop was only slated to be a pop-up store, however, customer response to the stores was so pronounced, the retailer decided permanently to move into the brick and mortar business. Currently, there are six locations and the company has plans to expand further into places like Toronto and the U.S.
The Latest Scoop’s success is largely attributed to the company’s innovative model, unique merchandise and customer service. The company has the ability to adjust more quickly to fashion trends than traditional retailers. Twice per year, the stores are completely disassembled and reimagined, giving customers a renewed sense of that pop-up feel from the early days.
The Challenge
Prior to its data stack implementation, The Latest Scoop’s business was closely managed. Data analysts and marketers monitored the company’s KPI’s, such as daily, weekly and monthly sales and KPI’s like any productive business.
However, the company's significant growth and inflexible systems meant monitoring the business success metrics became increasingly manual and tedious. The Latest Scoop’s expanding lineup of stores and merchandise increased the team’s need for multiple, aggregated views of sales, inventory and location data. The company needed a better solution than the hours of manual data pulls, CSV file downloads, and spreadsheet pivot tables.
Adrien Nichol, Director of Operations led the charge to solve the company’s data challenges. One such challenge the team experienced was that the business had many questions about its data and wanted timely answers.
Specifically, Nichol and his team wanted real-time performance visibility in contrast to viewing old data. From his standpoint, he felt it was important to know how the company was performing in real-time so the trends could be assessed and failures avoided.
An additional challenge of using legacy systems was the inability to create custom metrics. The company's former analytics tools defined how they could explore the data.
The Solution
Nichol and his team completed a successful data systems overhaul, renovating the team’s data approach. The result of this project was a scalable and adaptable cloud data warehouse paired with business intelligence and visualization capabilities.
The Latest Scoop’s data sources are now aggregated and combined thanks to two key tools: Panoply's unique combination of syncing and storage and the Looker business intelligence platform. Panoply enables comprehensive management of all the company’s data sources. Looker provides powerfully simple business intelligence tools and visualizations.
The two systems seamlessly work together with the help of Panoply’s built-in native integration. This data stack, which took just minutes to set up without being tech savvy, has given the company everything they need on their data and analytics wishlist.
The Results
Of the new data stack, Nichol says:
It’s been really exciting to be able to achieve real-time performance visibility with Looker and Panoply. We have alleviated a lot of hours tracking conversions at individual stores.
- Adrien Nichol, Director of Operations
One of the biggest wins they were able to achieve is a 360° view of the business. Before the Panoply and Looker data stack implementation, the company did not have consolidated data easily accessible in one place. Consequently, this caused a drain on productivity, cumbersome management of multiple systems, and manual manipulation of CSV files.
Nichol explains:
With Panoply and Looker it’s as if everything is sitting there in one place.
Furthermore, The Latest Scoop’s new data stack has created consistency of data definitions. That means marketing, customer service and sales teams all speak the same language no matter the team member’s level of data awareness and skill. With Panoply’s data stack solution, the ability to create and imagine metrics is wide open.
It’s been an effective way to put data in the hands of everybody.
The biggest benefit of all is that they now have a scalable, low maintenance data warehouse solution. Given The Latest Scoop’s promising success and growth in the last few years, it’s important to be set up for data growth in the future.
Now that they’ve implemented Panoply’s smart data stack, the team has a flexible solution that doesn’t require a DBA or additional IT staff. The Latest Scoop is set for a future that honors its initial goal: fresh, unique retail experiences.
With Panoply, The Latest Scoop can easily stay close to its customers, understand their preferences, and deliver the most personalized products possible. The future of this powerhouse pop-up boutique has been solidified by a data warehouse.
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