Flaconi is one of Germany‘s leading online beauty retailers, offering more than 720 brands and 45,000 fragrance, skin, hair, and natural cosmetics products. Flaconi’s goal is “unconditional customer service” and to be the most innovative online beauty store in Europe.
Flaconi’s legacy system had reached its limit — they needed a scalable analytics database to deliver reports in the right format at the right time, and simulation models to track performance indicators. They also wanted to enable employees to use self-service BI, accessing existing data easily for daily, better-informed decision-making.
After a short test phase, Flaconi opted to run Exasol’s full database application on the cloud and AWS, based on speed, the product roadmap, UDFs (User Defined Functions), and “the human factor,” something Martin Nguyen, Director of Strategy, Data, and Analytics said was key. Flaconi uses Python, Pentaho Data Integration, and AWS services for data integration. The company migrated from Power BI to Tableau, and the Exasol database currently hosts around three terabytes of data. Migration took six months from setting up the server to going live. Nguyen says: “Being able to genuinely transfer all the logics from the old database to the new one was important to us. We didn’t want to go live with less than what we had before.”
“Exasol has become our key tool. Everything we do is based on the database.”
Martin Nguyen, Director Strategy, Data and AnalyticsReports that used to be ready at midday are now available by 5:30 a.m.
20 users have direct access to Exasol, with 100 more using dashboards, cubes, and reports
ETL processes that used to take 45 minutes now take no more than 15
All data can be broken down to individual marketing channels by margin and product
Products are forecasted and automatically delivered to the warehouse — when a customer clicks on an item, it’s going to be available
Flaconi decides which products to promote to which customers on its site or in Google ads based on data and customer behavior