Data is leading the way at Regatta

Executive summary:

Regatta Group transformed its decision-making process, saved hours, and elevated trust in data analytics across its business by partnering with fifty-five and Funnel. The project automated reporting, refined metrics, and enabled data-driven location planning for new stores.

Key results:

• Fully automated cross-market reporting, eliminating blind spots and saves the marketing team 16 hours per week.
• New sets of dashboards and custom metrics that are trusted throughout the organization, from marketing operatives to board of directors.
• Data is now used as a key driver in omni-channel decisions, including deciding the location of new stores. 

Company profile:

Headquartered in Manchester, United Kingdom, Regatta Group is an omni-channel and wholesale outdoor clothing company. As of 2022, it employed 2,000 people and generated an annual turnover of £270 million across its five brands. The company operates 120 retail stores and has a presence in over 55 countries.

Partner profile:

fifty-five specializes in helping brands optimize their marketing, advertising, and customer experience through a blend of consultancy and technological services. Its team of more than 400 experts supports marketing initiatives globally across various sectors.

“As a Funnel Global Solution Partner since 2019, we have helped support our 10+ shared customers with a wide variety of complex data problems,” says Glenn Tamkin, Consulting Manager at fifty-five. “In order to support our clients to the fullest, we work closely with our Funnel partner team to ensure we’re trained to the highest level and have a deep understanding of both the product & the product roadmap.”

The challenge: Navigating a data maze

With its roots dating back to 1983, Regatta Group has long been committed to making outdoor experiences accessible through affordable products. By 2019 however, the company’s ecommerce and marketing teams faced significant issues in website tracking and marketing report consistency. Reports were created through tedious manual work by the marketing team, which was dispersed across multiple offices and time zones. This also meant that reports were in different formats, covered different KPI’s and were delivered at different times during a week, meaning that comparisons across regions were near impossible and overall trust in the data was low. 

Recognizing the urgency of digital transformation, Tom Goodman, the newly appointed Digital Director at Regatta, enlisted fifty-five— a Funnel solutions partner—to pave the way forward. Steven Watkinson, Senior Data & Insights Analyst at Regatta, was designated as the internal project leader.

The solution: A tailored data stack

Glenn Tamkin, Consulting Manager at fifty-five, worked closely with the team at Regatta to map out the best steps forward. For the analytics-side, the teams opted for implementing Google Analytics 4 and leveraging its native BigQuery exports. For the marketing reporting side, Glenn proposed Funnel, a platform he and the fifty-five team had successfully deployed in many other similar projects.

Glenn has high praise for Funnel, stating, “With its range of API connections, and capacity to account for custom connections, it was quickly identified that Funnel satisfied all of our requirements, and they were considerably cheaper & faster than building a custom solution.”

Upon Glenn’s introduction, Steven Watkinson and the Regatta team realized that Funnel could be the solution they were looking for. During an introduction session, Steven remembers being impressed with Funnel’s wide library of connectors. “It was like music to my ears because this is what I struggled with day to day, just getting data from point A to point B.” With data collection and data transformation now automated, Steven and the team built a series of key performance metrics and started displaying them in Power BI dashboards on screens in their office.

The results: A turnaround story

It didn’t take long until Regatta’s new analytics and reporting process started moving the needle. With all data gathering and cleaning taken care of using Funnel, the team could focus on building metrics and reports that they needed to drive performance forward and provide insights that were previously hidden in the troves of data. Before long, the granular insights that Steven and the team was providing were used in board meetings and even to help decide the locations of new physical stores. A key objective for Steven and fifty-five during this process has been building a robust foundation that makes it possible to trust in the numbers: “Tom (Regatta’s digital director) can now go into a board meeting knowing where the numbers he presents come from and confidently report on them.” 

When it comes to the future of Regatta, Steven is preparing for steep growth as the business pivots from being primarily wholesale to expanding its own ecommerce. Glenn at fifty-five is happy with how the project has progressed and now much of the day-to-day is handled by Steven and the team at Regatta. Glenn is also happy to see how well Funnel has been received at Regatta: 

“The reality is that Funnel is much cheaper than in-house solutions. (In-house solutions) do not work out best for the customer because it ends up being more expensive. And not only that, they break and when they do break, you need specialists to come in and fix it, which takes time. Funnel never breaks.”

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