About Shinesty
Shinesty, an online retailer, is shamelessly fun and a little provocative. The upbeat ecommerce store showcases products that range from American flag overalls to cheeky boxer briefs. Their apparel boasts names like “party wear” and “ball hammocks” (we’ll let you figure that one out.)
A New Data Focus
It’s clear that Shinesty does not shy away from being silly in their marketing. But this doesn’t mean they don’t take their business growth and marketing seriously. Shinesty has seen tremendous success due to their recent focus on data management.
While data is not always the most exciting term, it is currently the hottest area of business. The most successful companies today use data and insights to create captivating customer experiences and drive irrefutable sales growth.
A thoroughly modern and agile company, Shinesty is made up of 30 team members. The company runs a lean but effective team including just one IT professional and new addition, Bob Vermeulen, Shinesty’s Director of CRM. He has been the driver of their new focus on data.
Given the team is small, Vermeulen was tasked with a large constellation of responsibilities including managing the digital and customer data as well as connecting data sources and creating dashboard visualizations the entire company can access. Right away, he knew they needed to better leverage their customer data for deeper insights and action. He set out to find the right tools for the job.
The benefit of having such a lean team is that big decisions can be made quickly and intuitively. Choosing tools that work without need for intense IT intervention is absolutely crucial for startups like Shinesty. When resources are slim, the tools have to be rock solid.
Their New Tools for Success
A larger company would likely have at least three full time resources for Shinesty’s volume of data and analytics work, but Vermeulen came up with an ingenious solution to tackle the small company’s big data tasks.
He quickly realized the need for not only powerful data tools but also highly intuitive tools. He piloted a few solutions but ultimately chose just three products. This data stack is made up of Panoply, a cutting-edge data warehouse, Fivetran a database integration tool, and Looker a data visualization tool.
The most foundational piece of their data stack is Panoply which is the first “smart” data warehouse. Panoply is noteworthy because it integrates artificial intelligence and self-learning technology. An optimizing data warehouse is crucial because as the company grows, so do the number of data sources and the terabytes of information being stored.
Panoply is a tool that proved to be indispensable to Shinesty. While it easily handled high volumes of data, it was not complex to use in contrast to most data warehouse tools on the market. The added value of the data warehouse is its ability to use artificial intelligence to learn the data being housed and self-optimize as time goes on.
The result for the Shinesty team was hours of saved data processing time. Without any need for a database administrator, Vermeulen was able to get a data warehouse humming for Shinesty. The organized and alchemized data is able to be presented in compelling dashboards for marketing and sales teams to use in decision making.
The key success of Vermeulen was in his ability to quickly assess the company’s complex data needs and find the best data stack. He worked within the company’s constraints like budget and IT resources, and still found the tools that could empower growth.
Why Data Management Matters
Before the company got serious about their data stack, the channel managers were in copy/paste mode. They would take data from Google Analytics, Facebook, and their other digital platforms and paste them into one master spreadsheet. This manual and tedious work was not sustainable or motivating.
Now with a streamlined data warehouse and data stack, marketing managers and business owners can see all of their data in one hub. This means much less manual work and more time to see key patterns and formulate ideas that will sell.
Shinesty knows that data is nothing if it’s not in the hands of the team and decision makers. Their key initiative is to democratize data and make speed to insights as fast as possible. With such a nimble company, ideas flow and strategies can pivot within the day. Having dashboards available to support strategic shifts is key to being fast and smart.
How They Use Data Strategically
For a seemingly small retailer, Shinesty has very sophisticated strategies. With their new data stack in place, their information is flowing cohesively into a data warehouse and prepared for analysis. The type of data that Shinesty is piping through their data stack includes web traffic data, online ad data, email marketing information, and product inventory.
With this data they are able to leverage the holy grail of marketing: personalization and segmentation. Targeted messaging to each customer segment almost always leads to impressive conversion rates.
Their Future: Bold Moves
On the horizon, Shinesty is looking to hone their different customer segments. With tools like Panoply, the ability to identify those segments is now a reality. Their commitment is to maintaining a flexible data environment, knowing the online, ecommerce world can shift on a dime. Shinesty even has predictive analytics in their marketing roadmap, with a goal of learning what their customers truly value and giving it to them before they even need it.
Though their recent success has been driven by technical choices like their data warehouse, it has also been due to simple logic. Vermeulen credits choosing tools that “just work” for their success. No matter how appealing the tool, if it doesn’t integrate quickly, it is not sustainable for a fast moving startup like Shinesty.
