The Latest Scoop is a Vancouver-based boutique rooted in the unique model of a pop-up shop. The founder of the company was inspired to create the concept as a way to refresh and revise a retail landscape that had become boring and typical.
Adrien Nichol, Director of Operations at the Latest Scoop, shared the boutique’s journey from the exciting and novel pop-up shops to a mainstay retailer with an entrenched base of loyal customers.
In the beginning, Nichol describes how The Latest Scoop was only slated to be a pop-up model, however, the response to the stores was so pronounced, the retailer decided to move into the brick and mortar business. Currently, there are six locations and the company has plans to expand further into places like Toronto and the U.S..
Uniquely successful
The company’s early marketing efforts relied on word of mouth and email marketing. Today they continue on with these strategies but have their sights set on e-commerce as well.
The Latest Scoop’s success is largely attributed to their innovative model and their unique merchandise and customer service. The company has the ability to adjust more quickly to fashion trends than traditional retailers. Twice per year, their stores are completely disassembled and re-imagined, giving customers that pop-up feel from the early days.
The business of a boutique
It’s clear that the boutique is going strong, maintaining its initial value of being unique and surprising. Part of what continues the company forward is the support of a new data stack.
Nichol and his team recently went through a data systems overhaul, renovating their data approach. The result of this project was a scalable and adaptable cloud data warehouse paired with business intelligence and visualization capabilities.
Their journey from small boutique with word of mouth marketing to powerful, data-driven retailer involved several key systems and players. Let’s examine how the company truly became data focused.
Data-driven by design
Prior to their data stack implementation, The Latest Scoop’s business was closely managed. They monitored their daily, weekly and monthly sales and KPIs like any productive business. However, the company's significant growth and inflexible systems meant monitoring the business success metrics became highly manual and tedious. The Latest Scoop’s expanding lineup of stores and merchandise increased their need for multiple views of sales, inventory and location data.
The company needed a better solution than the hours of manual data pulls, CSV file downloads, and pivot tables.
The team defined several reasons that they wanted to build a next-generation data system. Frustratingly, the business had many questions about their data and wanted timely answers. Specifically, Nichol and his team wanted real-time performance visibility in contrast to viewing old data. From his standpoint, he felt it was important to know how the company was performing in real-time so the trends could be assessed and failures avoided.
Moving to the cloud
The Latest Scoop eventually landed on two key services for their data stack: Panoply and Looker. The combination of the two has given the company everything on their data and analytics wishlist.
Nichol says “It’s been really exciting to be able to achieve real-time performance visibility with Looker and Panoply. We have alleviated a lot of hours tracking conversions at individual stores.”
Some of the biggest wins they were able to achieve include a 360° view of the business. Before the Panoply and Looker implementation, the company did not have consolidated data. As mentioned, this caused a drain on productivity, management of multiple systems, and manual manipulation of CSV files.
Nichol describes, “With Panoply and Looker it’s as if everything is sitting there in one place.”
Prior to the flexibility of Panoply and Looker the company did not have the option to create their own metrics. Their former analytics tools defined how they could explore their data. With Looker and Panoply, the ability to create and imagine metrics is wide open.
Furthermore, their new data stack has created consistency of data definitions. All across their business, data and metrics are defined one way. That means marketing, customer service and sales teams all speak the same language no matter their level of data awareness and skill.
Nichol expressed, “It’s been an effective way to put data in the hands of everybody.”
The future is flexible
The company’s biggest benefit of all is that they now have a scalable data warehouse solution with low maintenance. Given their promising success and growth in the last few years, it’s important to be set up for data growth in the future.
Now that they’ve implemented Panoply for their ETL and data warehousing, the team has a flexible, easy-to-use solution that doesn’t require a DBA or additional headcount. The Latest Scoop is set for a future that honors their initial goal: fresh, unique retail experiences.
With a cloud data platform like Panoply, The Latest Scoop can easily stay close to its customers, understand their preferences, and deliver the most personalized products possible.
The future of this powerhouse pop-up boutique has been solidified by a data warehouse.
