Todd Snyder’s New York flagship store, along with two other locations and ecommerce store, have been hailed as innovative retail and lifestyle hubs by GQ, the New York Times, and others, solidifying the brand as a go-to destination for sharp dressers worldwide.
The Problem: Keeping Pace with the Speed of Fashion
In a world where today’s hottest shelf can become tomorrow’s discount rack, fashion retailers must be able to forecast their merchandise needs with precision. The more accurate their plans, the more likely they’ll have all the right styles, colors and sizes in stock, and the less old merchandise they’ll have to discount once the season changes.
Rapid growth meant that boutique retailer Todd Snyder needed a more robust approach for merchandising and planning. Previously, its small team of planners relied on a massive spreadsheet that it used to plan every size and color of every item it would carry. They would have to email the spreadsheet back and forth to manually update it with projected needs, limiting their ability to work on the plan simultaneously.
In addition, the onset of the pandemic found Tod Snyder quickly shifting its sales volumes from brick and mortar to online. Because its ecommerce and point of sales are separate systems, this made it difficult for company leaders to have a clear understanding into daily sales. The company’s leadership wanted to have more accurate, real-time analytics so they could keep their fingers on the pulse of the business as it continued to adapt to the new sales market.
The Solution: Looker + Bytecode IO
In order to make their data more visible and usable across the company, Todd Snyder’s operations team engaged Bytecode IO to deploy a complete cloud-based data platform. Todd Snyder’s goal was to enable a data-driven culture that would allow its planning team and company leaders to make decisions based on hard information instead of gut instinct.
Because the company at that point lacked a full-time data team, they needed tools that would be easy to use and manage by its existing users. And because more of its sales were coming from online, it needed to be able to leverage data sources like Google Analytics to generate new insights into customer demand.
Bytecode IO implemented a best-in-class data infrastructure that includes Google Cloud Platform’s BigQuery and Looker, along with Fivetran. This tech stack allows Todd Snyder to consolidate, harmonize, analyze and visualize data from Shopify, Google Analytics, their Point of Sales system, Google Sheets, historical inventory and pricing data, and data from its commodity partners.
In doing so, the company not only unlocked the ability to forecast its merchandise requirements more accurately and collaboratively in the cloud, but gained the ability to see real-time sales across its channels.
The Results: Faster Insight for Smarter Decisions
Thanks to Bytecode IO, Todd Snyder went from spreadsheets to Looker dashboards in less than 90 days after project kickoff. With all their data easily accessible in Looker, the team is able to now use accurate, up-to-the-minute sales data across retail locations and ecommerce store to better understand their business and customer demands. In addition, the planning team now has access to curated datasets where the heavy lifting is completed in the data platform instead of using manual processes in Excel, giving the team hours back each week to focus on planning instead of making the spreadsheet work.
Looker is now the foundation for decision making across the organization:
The merchandise planning team uses Looker to create a single view of product inventory that encompasses its three retail locations and its warehouse. They use this view to compare it against expected demand so they can move or reorder stock as needed to ensure appropriate inventory levels.
Company leaders use an executive dashboard to track real-time revenue against forecasts in order to determine where to focus future investments, initiatives, and new store locations.
The marketing team is able to easily combine data from Shopify, the Point of Sale System, and Google Analytics to identify trends, validate marketing campaign performance, and inform channel strategies.
Bytecode IO served as Todd Snyder’s technical team lead, Looker developer, data engineer and solution architect, allowing the retailer to focus on their business instead of the technical challenge of implementing a data platform. Bytecode IO also provided the Todd Snyder team with weekly 1:1 training sessions to help them maximize their use of Looker, improving their ability to integrate advanced analytics and visualizations into their existing processes. Bytecode IO continues to provide ongoing technical support so the Todd Snyder team can focus on using data to make decisions instead of managing it.
Results At A Glance:
- Managed the complete deployment and support of new Looker platform.
- Evolved from manual spreadsheets to a cloud-based platform in less than 90 days.
- Enable a data-driven culture across planning, marketing, and leadership.