How to spot voids and protect ...
November 8, 2021
With retail data delivered automatically through Snowflake, Crisp helped Ritual unlock omnichannel success while avoiding the cost and workload of managing data pipelines internally.
Born in the 2010s direct-to-consumer boom, Ritual quickly carved a niche with its line of science-backed, women-owned vitamin essentials. But as customer love grew, so did the need for a physical presence. In 2022, Ritual took the leap into retail, starting with Whole Foods and expanding to Target nationwide in 2023.
This shift from purely online sales to an omnichannel model called for a robust data solution to streamline the brand’s digital-gone-retail operations.
Faced with the critical decision of whether to build an in-house system or adopt an existing solution, Ritual’s analytics team chose Crisp for its seamless integration with their existing Snowflake platform, ensuring a smooth flow of daily data while saving costs and making the most of its team’s skills.
Bridging the data divide
A tech-forward organization, Ritual’s initial data set-up was advanced for a direct-to-consumer brand, housing D2C sales data, 3PL order information, and digital advertising data all within Snowflake.
Brett Trani, Director of Analytics at Ritual, recounts: “Before expanding into retail, we had all of our business insights in our data warehouse, so we had a good handle on how things were running and who our customers were.”
However, as the brand ventured into brick-and-mortar, which comparatively lacks the same integrated data infrastructure as digital channels, the need for retail insights in Snowflake became evident.
Brett’s team began to manage retail data ingestion in-house but quickly saw challenges with this approach.
For Target, Ritual initially extracted sales and inventory data into Google Sheets each day, a solution that offered limited visibility and scalability. Hoping to establish a reliable connection, the team built an integration to Target’s API. Unfortunately, the pipeline would regularly break, or experience schema drift – where structure of source data changes unexpectedly, disrupting data flow and analysis. Maintaining this connection became a burden on Ritual’s resources and data quality.
Ingesting Whole Foods data proved even more daunting. With limited time and data challenges mounting, the team decided to explore other options.
“We needed a scalable solution for our growing and diversifying retail business, and that’s when we looked to Crisp,” Brett shared.
For Ritual’s analytics team, Crisp’s organized data schema, reliability, and automation made it an optimal choice. Starting with a free trial, Crisp quickly integrated Ritual’s Target and Whole Foods data into Snowflake and began pulling reports right away.
“It was a matter of a very quick data share, and we saw Crisp data in Snowflake within an hour or two,” Brett remembers.
“We needed a scalable solution for our growing and diversifying retail business, and that’s when we looked to Crisp.”
Brett Trani, Director of Data and Analytics at Ritual
A new daily essential
The decision to adopt Crisp, coupled with their existing Snowflake platform, marked a pivotal moment for Ritual. The integration meant that sales teams could monitor their retail channels more efficiently, operations could manage the supply chain with increased visibility, and finance could plan more strategically. Crisp offered a solution to Ritual’s immediate data management needs, as well as a foundation for growth and optimization across the organization.
On top of Snowflake, the team utilizes a Looker integration to build custom reports and visualizations, enabling Ritual to adapt rapidly to market changes and consumer needs.
Powered with Crisp data, these models include a “Weeks Worth of Inventory” report by product SKU and location to gauge stock levels; and a game-changing unified orders dashboard that allows the team to see all orders across the business – combining brick-and-mortar with Amazon and DTC for a complete view.
These retail analytics grant Ritual’s Operations team complete product journey visibility, from warehousing to point-of-sale (POS), fueling business optimization initiatives to minimize stockouts and markdowns, boosting on-shelf success.
As for the sales team, the days of ad-hoc reporting and mixed-up spreadsheets are over. They now have streamlined access to accurate, up-to-date data, allowing them to focus more on strategy and less on sorting out data discrepancies. “Across the board, the solution has been a huge time saver for every team,” Brett emphasized.
According to Brett, the team has saved over 10 hours a week on manual reporting, and they haven’t had to manage or troubleshoot any part of Crisp’s data flow.
What’s more, the integration of Crisp with Snowflake helps Ritual view real-time sales and inventory data alongside direct-to-consumer data, advertising data, and EDI order records. Within Snowflake, Ritual can efficiently access, analyze, and act upon data sets aggregated across multiple sources to uncover valuable new insights.
Crisp and Snowflake grant Ritual’s Operations team complete product journey visibility, from warehousing to point-of-sale (POS), fueling business optimization initiatives to minimize stockouts and markdowns, boosting on-shelf success.
Working smarter, not harder
When faced with the choice of creating an in-house solution or adopting an existing platform for their data needs, Ritual saw that partnering with Crisp and Snowflake delivered stronger ROI. The decision was influenced by the complexity and ongoing costs associated with building a new system from the ground up.
“I’m a huge proponent of buy versus build when it comes to something like extracting retail data from vendor portals,” Brett explains.
“We spent a lot of time trying to devise a solution. But even after putting in the upfront hours – we still had the whole other project of making sense of the data and integrating it into our larger ecosystem,” he added.
By choosing to integrate Crisp’s solution with Snowflake, Ritual avoided the lengthy and costly process of building, maintaining, and regularly updating an internal system.
“I’m a huge proponent of buy versus build when it comes to something like extracting retail data from vendor portals.
Brett Trani, Director of Data and Analytics at Ritual
We spent a lot of time trying to devise a solution. But even after putting in the upfront hours – we still had the whole other project of making sense of the data and integrating it into our larger ecosystem.”
The build vs buy equation
Ritual’s story showcases how a data-savvy emerging brand can embrace a solution like Crisp to efficiently trim costs and fuel its nationwide retail expansion.
However, for an average mid-market CPG, the decision to continue managing internal data pipelines can become much more costly. The expenses involved in ingesting, processing, computing, and storing retail data internally, along with dedicated developer hours (1.5 full-time headcount), can accumulate to over $240,000 a year.
These costs can significantly impact margins in the increasingly competitive CPG landscape, underlining a need for efficient and cost-effective data management solutions.
In addition to cost savings, access to reliable, timely data across the company can also lead to tangible business impacts. Crisp’s Impact Calculator demonstrates that a company with even Ritual’s retail footprint can boost annual revenue by +5%, or $500,000 leveraging data to reduce out-of-stocks and expand distribution.
Internal pipeline management costs can significantly impact margins in the increasingly competitive CPG landscape, underlining a need for efficient and cost-effective data management solutions.
The future is clear
In the year ahead, Ritual plans to build on its success to drive further growth and product innovation. The scalability and flexibility provided by Crisp and Snowflake have equipped Ritual with the tools necessary for continuous improvement and expansion into new markets.
“With Crisp, we recognize the opportunity to optimize everything, and make every facet of our operations better,” Brett shared. “It gives us a lot of confidence into the future.”
To learn more about how Crisp data can future-proof your retail operations, book a demo here.
Interested in seamlessly integrating Crisp data with your Snowflake account? Visit our Snowflake marketplace listing here.
