bonprix: Enhances the shopping experience with scalable ML and AI automation with Google Cloud

About bonprix

Online retailer bonprix sells quality affordable fashion and homewares and operates across Europe, Russia, and North America

Industries: Retail & Consumer Goods

Location: Germany

Products: Google Cloud, BigQuery, Cloud Storage

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About partners

KPMG
Google Cloud partner KPMG AG Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft helps organizations to build data and analytics solutions and support with BI consulting, cloud data warehouse design, cloud migration, machine learning technology, and advanced analytics.

Aliz
Google Cloud partner Aliz specializes in machine learning, data analytics, and cloud migration.

Moving from an on-premises infrastructure to Google Cloud enables bonprix to focus on developing both machine learning and AI-based solutions, alongside data products and data modeling.

Google Cloud results

Migration to Google Cloud completed in 12 months, on time, and on budget
Significantly reduces time to develop new ML models to just two weeks
Moves IT team from focusing on infrastructure management to service creation

40% to 50% more cost-effective than on-premises solution

Hamburg-based bonprix set out to bring stylish, durable, reasonably priced mail-order fashion to Germany in 1986. With its roots in mail order, bonprix’s infrastructure was well placed to service the developing online market, and 11 years later, in 1997, it launched its first online shop. Today, bonprix is an online international fashion and homeware retailer operating across Europe, Russia, and North America. Its 3,000-strong workforce supports more than 35 million global customers and 90% of its revenues come from ecommerce.

“Being an early adopter of ecommerce and seeing the success it has brought us has led bonprix to strive to always be at the forefront of technology,” reveals Saleh Mohammad-Pour, Department Lead Data Engineering at bonprix. To this end, bonprix has strong in-house development and data engineering teams always looking to maximize the potential of available and developing technology to optimize its business goals.

“Google Cloud has supported us from A to Z. The Google Cloud team shows us what we can do with each of its tools and how we can use them to create a particular path. It has proven to be a strong partner that is always on our side.”

—Saleh Mohammad-Pour, Head of Business Intelligence BI & Data Engineering, bonprix

Outdated on-premises solution spurs cloud move

bonprix had been relying on a traditional on-premises data warehouse setup based on Teradata and a data lake based on Cloudera Hadoop. This suited its purpose when it was installed, but as the amount of raw data the company collected grew, storage costs rose. “Having two different systems, one for our structured or tabulated data and another for our unstructured text-based data, became increasingly problematic too,” says Mohammad-Pour. “To compare data from two places, we had to shift one lot across to the other, which was time consuming and complicated because we had to operate the two separate systems. We wanted all our data in the same place, largely to enhance our machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities. The cloud was the most advanced and scalable solution.”

bonprix looked at global cloud players, but it settled on Google Cloud. “From the beginning of our journey, we had a good feeling about Google Cloud, and it’s never left,” says Mohammad-Pour. “Google Cloud has supported us from A to Z. The Google Cloud team shows us what we can do with each of its tools and how we can use them to create a particular path. It has proven to be a strong partner that is always on our side.”

Google Cloud Premier partner’s expertise sped up the migration

Saleh Mohammad-Pour always looks outside his team when he doesn’t have the in-house expertise. Not having worked with Google Cloud previously, he called on Google Cloud partners KPMG and Aliz to help with the migration to the cloud. “I chose both Aliz and KPMG because their teams gelled with our team. We had an instant rapport, and I could see that we would work together well,” he says.

With the help of KPMG and Aliz, bonprix’s migration to Google Cloud began in March 2020 and was completed 12 months later in March 2021, on time and on budget. Quite some feat, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We went from seeing each other in person every day to our home offices overnight, but it didn’t impede the migration,” says Mohammad-Pour. “We actually found that we became more productive because we could talk to each other virtually whenever needed.”

“All our data is now being centralized on BigQuery. This will make it easier to develop machine learning models and data products at scale. When you’re on the cloud, scaling is not a big deal. With a few clicks you can extend your compute power or memory.”

—Saleh Mohammad-Pour, Head of Business Intelligence BI & Data Engineering, bonprix

Machine learning from Google Cloud

To drive automation and optimize its operations, bonprix had begun experimenting with some machine learning use cases prior to its move to Google Cloud, but now the opportunities for machine learning have snowballed.

Using the Google Cloud data warehouse, BigQuery, bonprix now has all its structured and unstructured data in one place, making it easier and faster to analyze and integrate the data for machine learning.

Significantly cutting machine learning model development time

bonprix also finds the new setup better suited to testing new use cases. The on-premises process for building machine learning models was so taxing that it disincentivized the team. “We had to spend so much time and effort on the old platform to develop any machine learning programs, that we thought twice about testing anything,” says Mohammad-Pour. “Now the development cycle is so fast, we can test out a model and if we find it makes business sense we go live with it. If it doesn’t, we haven’t wasted much time trying. We throw it away and start another use case.”

The time it takes to develop new ML models has been significantly reduced, now taking just two weeks. And, now that bonprix’s structured and unstructured data is stored together on Google Cloud, it has seen its data storage costs drop too.

Machine learning in action

bonprix hasn’t wasted any time building up its machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities. “Based on data we have triggered from our customers, we have created a recommendation engine that recommends similar products to customers based on what they click on. We have also created a fraud-detection system, and we are now looking at programmatic advertising that lets us forecast the return on investment for different advertising spots. We have a lot of other machine learning-based use cases in development too,” says Mohammad-Pour. In the spring/summer season 2021, bonprix increased its recommendation engine demand by up to 25% on the previous spring/summer season.

“Google Cloud has taken over the management of much of our infrastructure, so we can concentrate time and resources on developing new data products and getting them to market faster, and what’s great is we are doing this with 40% to 50% cost savings compared to our former setup.”

—Saleh Mohammad-Pour, Head of Business Intelligence BI & Data Engineering, bonprix

bonprix’s cloud infrastructure is in expansion mode

Looking ahead, bonprix hopes to integrate Google Cloud with the external workflow solution Apache Airflow. It also plans to use Google Cloud management tools and get insights into its data analysis, datastore, databases, and developer services, with a particular focus on making machine learning use cases easier to develop and deploy.

While much of bonprix’s developers’ and engineers’ time was focused on managing the department’s data warehouse infrastructure, Google Cloud has now freed up a lot of this time so that they can now focus on creating new data based products. Mohammad-Pour concludes: “Google Cloud has taken over the management of much of our infrastructure, so we can concentrate time and resources on developing new data products and getting them to market faster, and what’s great is we are doing this with 40% to 50% cost savings compared to our former setup.”

Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.

About bonprix

Online retailer bonprix sells quality affordable fashion and homewares and operates across Europe, Russia, and North America

Industries: Retail & Consumer Goods

Location: Germany

About partners

Google Cloud BigQuery Cloud Storage