How Fivetran powers SKIMS’ fashion empire

SKIMS is a shapewear and clothing brand that’s taken the market by storm. Co-founded by Kim Kardashian and Jens Grede in 2019, the online brand sold out its entire inventory within 10 minutes of launching. Since then, the company has rapidly grown, disrupting the online clothing industry with a data-driven approach embraced by every discipline at the company.

Leading SKIMS’ data efforts is Chris Chapo, Senior Vice President of Data, Insights, and Loyalty. He’s built a strong data culture alongside a modern data stack consisting of Fivetran, Snowflake, and dbt, bringing his expertise to the forefront of omnichannel retail.

A modern fashion business needs a modern data stack

It’s no small task running a lean data operation at a high-profile brand. With millions of social media followers across several networks, SKIMS’ sales are fast-paced and demanding. Managing and unifying large, disparate datasets to keep up with the pace of the business was an immediate priority for Chapo when he started in 2021.

His first task was to ingest every customer touch point across marketing, web, and e-commerce and join them with operations and product data. At the time, SKIMS’ data pipelines were all DIY — unsustainable for Chapo’s lean, forward-thinking approach.

“Our philosophy is that there’s limited value-add in building our own ingestion and extraction frameworks. If we have a lean team, we want to use it to generate insights across the entire operation. We picked Fivetran because it’s the best data integration platform in the market. It would take about 6-7 data engineers to get the velocity we’re at with Fivetran.”
— Chris Chapo, Senior Vice President of Data, Insights, and Loyalty at SKIMS

Product performance use case

SKIMS leverages Fivetran for data integration and Snowflake for centralized storage and processing. Fivetran enables Chapo’s team to quickly build more than 60 pipelines for the core services powering SKIMS’ business, including Shopify, Klaviyo, and Attentive. With just a few clicks, SKIMS’ data team can move a high volume of governed data from various sources into Snowflake, giving all downstream services — like Looker, dbt, and Census — the data they need for their operational workflows.

Those findings are combined with Google Analytics clickstream data to demonstrate important key metrics, like last-click attribution. These insights allow Chapo to identify which product categories and types have the highest value for long-term customer satisfaction. This new granular view on customer lifetime value (LTV) and purchase data helps the business identify what made a product successful and how to replicate that in future product releases. 

“With Fivetran and Snowflake, we can pinpoint the products that offer the most value to our customers by analyzing detailed product attributes, purchase data, web and app clickstream data, and customer reviews and feedback. This insight allows our team to replicate the success of our top-performing products.”
— Chris Chapo, Senior Vice President of Data, Insights, and Loyalty at SKIMS

In addition, this helps the business with planning, allocation, and inventory management. Chapo’s team can inform decisions about how much to buy, what color, and in what size — granular data that Fivetran helps pull together. 

Paid media analytics use case

SKIMS’ promotion is done through over 15 performance marketing channels including Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, and television. Fivetran combines data from those channels into the SKIMS DNA platform, a single marketing data repository, to help the business track how much the brand is spending by day on what type of activity. Those findings are combined with Google Analytics clickstream data to demonstrate important key metrics, like marketing spend, last-click return on advertising spend (ROAS) and customer acquisition cost (CAC).

Sales reporting use case

SKIMS’ sales reports are more sophisticated than a typical “how many units did we sell?” dashboard. For its high-performance needs, the business requires detailed and time-based sales data, like near real-time sell-through rates.

Fivetran effortlessly moves data from Shopify and NetSuite into the DNA platform, ensuring near real-time updates from the website and marketing channels. Traditionally, the business team would spend valuable time compiling base numbers from spreadsheets. With Fivetran, they can now focus on reading reports and analyzing the business. This approach scales insights and analytics without requiring a massive data team to support. 

Growing a multi-billion dollar powerhouse on a lean data platform

Chapo and his team have enabled the business to scale to incredible new heights. SKIMS announced a partnership with the NBA and WNBA, nationwide distribution through retail partnerships and even its brick-and-mortar retail locations. All these new data streams will quickly integrate into SKIMS DNA’s automated workflows thanks to Fivetran.

Chapo’s team is focused on some exciting projects in 2025, including:

• Driving adoption of its mobile app and SKIMS rewards program. By combining data from Shopify and Antavo Loyalty Cloud, SKIMS will enhance growth and engagement with personalized offers and challenges. 
• Deploying AI across the business. Combining the breadth of data provided by Fivetran, SKIMS aims to quickly identify business drivers to inform sales channels, design teams, and buying teams. 

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