“Bytecode was invaluable. They helped us with tricky join questions, schedule timing, and maximizing refresh speeds. Their documentation meant we could fix changes in under an hour,” Ellison says.

Framebridge now uses Looker for all internal business functions across its operations, feeding data from multiple sources such as marketing platforms for attribution, custom platforms, third-party data, and Shopify data into Looker. “Looker is the engine of everything for Framebridge,” Ellison says. The tool integrates with the company’s existing stack, which includes BigQuery.

Employees got up to speed on Looker quickly thanks to training facilitated by Bytecode, which involved developer sessions led by a Bytecode expert to teach LookML best practices.

The migration to Looker brought immediate operational benefits to Framebridge. Data latency was reduced from 4–5 hours to under 15 minutes, and plant managers and executives now rely on real-time dashboards across 45 stores to make daily decisions. “Our head of operations sent me a picture of his data room — TV monitors with Looker dashboards auto-refreshing. That’s something we could never have before,” says Ellison.

Data governance and accuracy have improved because Looker’s semantic layer ensures consistent definitions across complex product categories and eliminates conflicting definitions across teams. “We sell custom frames, preset frames, tabletops, ornaments. It’s very different to make each of those products,” says Ellison. Accuracy in reporting is super important. Looker’s governance prevents 8,000 table calculations from proliferating unchecked.” The solution’s GitHub integration enables transparent pull requests for metric changes, and controlled access provides specific permissions to prevent uncontrolled sandboxing.

Framebridge also has self-service analytics with Looker in place, allowing teams to pivot data, set up charts, and create alerts independently while freeing the BI team from repetitive requests and focus more on forward-looking initiatives. Says Ellison, “It’s really nice to say, ‘I’m going to look at Q1 projects.’ It’s not how many dashboards I can build — it’s how I integrate new data sources or automate processes. We’re thinking strategically about retail expansion and customer data.”

With these capabilities, Framebridge built a holiday dashboard in less than a day, enabling real-time monitoring during peak season. In addition, the solution’s Shopify integration unlocked sales insights, and the company improved customer service by creating automatic alerts for missed orders.

Looker has also made an impact at the store level. The tool’s intuitive design and mobile app transformed accessibility for store teams, and store associates use Looker every day for customer interactions. A zero-outage launch was achieved through a dedicated testing platform set up by Bytecode, including testing with a store team member using both the old and new tools on separate iPads. “The app on the iPad is one of the most viewed pieces of content. Store associates can type in a customer name and see everything about the order. That’s huge,” says Ellison.

Framing the future

Framebridge sees Looker as critical for sustaining the company’s exponential growth. “Without Looker, it would feel unsustainable. We’re expanding rapidly, and we needed a heavy tool to support our growth,” says Ellison. Future priorities include tabbed dashboards to reduce redundancy and improve usability, on-demand web tests with detailed click-level data, and conversational analytics to enable trusted natural language queries for executives. “Framebridge is such a data-driven company. We can’t afford to get it wrong,” says Ellison. “Looker has enabled us to get it right.”