How Sephora cut costs and enhanced insights

Executive summary:

Sephora, a leader in global prestige omni-retail, partnered with Hanalytics and Funnel to revolutionize its data management, achieving a remarkable 75% reduction in data processing costs. This partnership streamlined data processing across 18 European teams, providing enhanced insights and reports while saving significant time in data collection and analysis. The initiative enabled both central and local teams to access consistent data, fostering better decision-making from the ground level to senior leadership. This case study explores the transformative journey of Sephora’s data strategy, showcasing the impact of efficient data integration in a large-scale retail environment.

Key results:

• Reduced data warehouse costs by 75%.
• Provides reports to 18 local teams across Europe, with more data and insights than ever before
• Central and local teams save hours every week not having to manually collect, assemble and analyze data.
• Everyone at Sephora has access to the same data, from senior leadership to local markets. 

Company profile:

Sephora, a leader in prestige omni-retail, operates over 2,700 stores in 35 countries and a sprawling ecommerce store. It has been a champion of diversity, inclusivity, and empowerment since its first store opened in 1969 in France. Part of the LVMH group a, Sephora is known for its unique open-sell environment and a wide range of products including more than 250 brands.

Partner profile:

Hanalytics, is a boutique marketing data agency, was founded in 2021. The Hanalytics team consists of specialists within data engineering, data science and analytics that specialize in implementing modern data stack solutions for brands and marketing agencies alike. 

The challenge: Data scattered across Europe

In 2022, Sephora faced an acute challenge with data scattered across its marketing teams across Europe. Every week, the central data team at Sephora had to wait for marketing reports to be sent to them from local markets before consolidating everything, analyzing the results and presenting it to senior leadership. To say that this was time consuming and inefficient would be an understatement, just the data collection and consolidation took the team one day a week. 

At this point, the data agency Hanalytics was contracted to find a long-term solution that could help alleviate this manual work and allow the central data team to focus on more valuable tasks, such as building more advanced measurements.  In the future, leadership at Sephora was keen to provide local markets with access to more insights and data, like benchmarking figures, to help them further improve campaign performance. 

The solution: Implementing a modern data stack

The first step was for Hanalytics to scope which tooling they should use to build the new desired data stack. When implementing a modern data stack, there are several considerations that need to be considered and there are a lot of different tools to choose from for each part of the stack. 

When it came to data collection, the first option was to build data pipelines in-house. However, this option was quickly ruled out because it was estimated that the project would take years to fully complete to cater to the local markets, on-top of the ongoing maintenance it would require. 

Since Sephora already used Funnel and another ETL-tool in parts of the organization, Hanalytics could easily start evaluating these options first. Through a series of testing to understand how the tools worked and how well they integrated with BigQuery, the data warehouse of choice, Hamis Badarou, Chief Analytics Officer at Hanalytics, remembers thinking that Funnel was a game changer in terms of how efficient it was: 

“With data consolidated in Funnel, we can output clean data tables with just the dimensions and metrics we need, instead of having to consolidate hundreds of tables in BigQuery. This alone saves us 75% on data processing costs.”

Sephora and Hanalytics assembled a data stack where marketing data is ingested, cleaned and prepared as one table in Funnel, sent to BigQuery, transformed using dbt and then visualized using Looker Studio. 

The results: Empowering senior leadership and local markets 

It quickly became evident that the new data stack assembled by Hanalytics was generating positive results at Sephora. For starters, the central data team at Sephora got one working day a week back since they no longer had to collect and assemble reports from the local markets. 

The original scope of the project only included for Hanalytics to build a report for senior leadership but thanks to the efficient process it was expanded to also include operational reports that are used by the local markets. This means that everyone in the organization, from local markets all the way to senior leadership, is making decisions based on the same data which greatly facilitates the ability for a company to collaborate and move quickly. 

From not having heard about Funnel 18 months ago, Hamis is delighted with his experience and has started implementing it with other customers in Hanalytics customer base: 

“Funnel has become our preferred tool for integrating marketing data, we think it is the industry leader in the category”.

Facing hurdles in reporting and data management? Reach out to see how Funnel can streamline and improve your processes.