How Fivetran centralised DOUGLAS’ 200+ data sources

“With the help of Fivetran, we were able to connect a large number of data sources in a very short time and thus massively increase the speed of our project.”
— Jonas Rashedi, Director of Data Intelligence & Technologies at DOUGLAS

DOUGLAS is the leading premium beauty platform in Europe, inspiring customers to live their own kind of beauty. Offering more than 130,000 beauty and lifestyle products in online shops, the beauty marketplace, and over 2,000 stores. In fiscal year 2019-2020, DOUGLAS generated sales of 3.2 billion euros in the areas of perfumery, decorative cosmetics, skin and hair care as well as nutritional supplements and accessories.‍

The Challenge: Making eCommerce a business priority

To accomplish the paradigm shift to “Digital First”, DOUGLAS knew it needed to enhance its existing infrastructure and processes, particularly around BI (Business Intelligence) and data analytics. Before Fivetran, scattered systems for collecting data and an overreliance on spreadsheets and manual input were not scalable.

The Solution: Selecting fit-for-purpose infrastructure

DOUGLAS made the decision to invest in a future-orientated, best-practice combination of Fivetran for automated data integration, Snowflake for the data warehouse, and Tableau for data analytics. Around 200 active connectors are pulling data from multiple data sources with Fivetran. This has given the business market intelligence across everything from assessing the most successful digital advertising campaigns to insights into product and pricing trends.‍

“Fivetran is a substantial part of an investment that brought DOUGLAS to the next level in data analytics for our e-com department.”
— Jonas Rashedi, Director of Data Intelligence & Technologies at DOUGLAS.

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With automated data integration by Fivetran, BI analysts, BI engineers, data scientists, as well as marketing and eCommerce experts can turn data into actionable insights more quickly. At the same time, the company was pleased to have a robust, resilient and GDPR-compliant architecture that would fulfil all of the necessary security requirements for a large, internationally operating online enterprise dealing with a lot of sensitive customer data.‍

The Outcome: Europe’s largest digital-first beauty retailer with a unique omnichannel experience

The real game-changer was replacing manual processes with an automated environment. With the modern data stack, DOUGLAS calculates it saves the time equivalent to 2-3 full time employees. The performance gains, in terms of fast access to data and the resilience and scalability of the new infrastructure, have given DOUGLAS a future-proof foundation for further growth. More sophisticated data analytics are already underway, with one workstream delving deeper into data science.

By transitioning into a data-driven business that leverages state-of-the-art technology and data modelling, the company has become an attractive employer for data engineers, analysts and scientists who are known to be hard to recruit. New employees on the DOUGLAS data team will now be able to focus on generating insights and growing the business, instead of manually building data pipelines. The company aspires to be one of the best employers in Europe, and by attracting top IT talent DOUGLAS is confident it can continue its spectacular growth trajectory.

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