HOLZRICHTER Berlin: Bagging ecommerce success with a scalable, cloud-based data warehouse
About HOLZRICHTER Berlin
HOLZRICHTER Berlin believes that the best bags are made for life. Using 100% natural, vegetable-tanned materials, HOLZRICHTER Berlin sells timeless leather products at affordable prices, exclusively offered online.
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About Seibert Media
Seibert Media helps companies to select, implement, and scale cloud solutions to solve their most pressing business challenges and innovate for the future.
By building a BigQuery based business intelligence platform, HOLZRICHTER Berlin puts crucial insights at the fingertips of all employees, enabling data-driven decisions that help to grow the business.
Google Cloud results
- Increases data access from 20% to 100% of employees, enabling more autonomous, data-driven decisions
- Equips after-sales team with crucial data insights, empowering employees to act proactively to ensure customer satisfaction
- Improves the quality of data insights by removing silos and adding multiple data sources in one data warehouse with BigQuery
- Simplifies data-driven decisions for each team, with custom and intuitive visual dashboards in Looker Studio
Delivering data transparency to 100% of employees
Tastes may change, but leather is timeless. And HOLZRICHTER Berlin is giving leather a 21st century makeover, with affordable, sustainable, and high-quality leather products exclusively sold online.
"HOLZRICHTER Berlin is about rediscovering timeless leather designs of the past," explains Alexander Korduan, founder and CEO, HOLZRICHTER Berlin. "Our growing collection of leather bags and accessories mainly uses natural, vegetable-tanned leather, made to last a lifetime. And because we're a direct-to-consumer business, we can offer these products at really competitive prices."
Going all-in on ecommerce doesn't just benefit customers, it makes HOLZRICHTER Berlin much more flexible than a traditional, brick-and-mortar leather manufacturer would be. Just like the company's sales channels, its marketing strategy is 100% digital, and many of the staff work remotely. In order to build a strong, autonomous culture and empower these employees with data-driven insights, HOLZRICHTER Berlin decided to build out its business intelligence capabilities with Google Cloud.
"Google Workspace was our first foray into the Google Cloud ecosystem, and we really liked how simple and reliable the solutions are. We wanted to bring that same ease-of-use and stability to the way we work with data, which is why we decided to build our business intelligence solution with Google Cloud."
—Alexander Korduan, founder and CEO, HOLZRICHTER BerlinBuilding a scalable cloud foundation for a data-driven work culture
HOLZRICHTER Berlin was already using Google Workspace to connect its team across offices and remote locations. "Google Workspace was our first foray into the Google Cloud ecosystem, and we really like how simple and reliable the solutions are," says Korduan. "We wanted to bring that same ease-of-use and stability to the way we work with data, which is why we decided to build our business intelligence solution with Google Cloud."
HOLZRICHTER Berlin had teamed up with Google Cloud partner Seibert Media to roll out its collaboration tools, and was keen to extend the partnership to the data project. "Introducing powerful technological solutions can be a bit intimidating when you're a smaller company and still working to build technical competence in certain areas," says Korduan. "Having a partner like Seibert Media at our side really enabled us to jump into Google Cloud with confidence, and realize that building a business intelligence platform is not rocket science."
Johnnie Clapper, Entrepreneur in Residence, Seibert Media, adds: "There's this misconception in many businesses that everyone else is already much further along in their data journey, when in reality, most companies are still starting out. That's why it's so important to make challenges tangible, and build knowledge and awareness first."
After an initial training phase with a cloud foundation workshop, in which Seibert Media shared scalable solutions to HOLZRICHTER Berlin's data challenges, the team decided to start with a single use case that would showcase the capabilities of a Google Cloud-based business intelligence solution. They selected the customer success team, where improving the data access was especially important.
Putting data at the heart of business decisions
In the past, HOLZRICHTER Berlin's customer success team was held back by a lack of unified data access: data was spread across different siloes and insights were gathered using different third-party tools that weren’t always reliable. As a result, employees couldn't easily get ahold of the data they needed. After-sales specialists, for example, lacked access to key figures, such as the timelines of its logistics partners. Without oversight, the HOLZRICHTER Berlin team ran the risk of missing important issues, such as shipping delays, which could leave customers dissatisfied.
By setting up BigQuery at the core of its data collection strategy, HOLZRICHTER Berlin consolidated its data silos. Today, data from a range of external and internal sources live in a serverless and highly scalable data warehouse, powered by BigQuery. BigQuery is connected to Looker Studio, enabling the team to visualize data in flexible dashboards.
"BigQuery and Looker Studio help us to deliver the right data to the right person at the right time," explains Korduan. "With reliable data at our fingertips, our customer success team can make more informed decisions and react quickly to potential problems, which makes us more responsive to customer needs." If members of the customer success team see early indicators of potential issues, from shipping delays to transport damages, they can take action proactively, keeping customer satisfaction at a high level.
Bringing data insights to 100% of employees
Bolstered by quick wins in the customer success team, HOLZRICHTER Berlin began leveraging the business intelligence solution in all other areas of the company. Based on individual KPIs and data requirements that are systematically defined for each team, HOLZRICHTER Berlin can build custom dashboards that will help employees access whatever data insights they need.
"Now that we have our business intelligence solution in place, we can quite easily plug in new data sources, or create new dashboards and visualizations," says Korduan. "We've created the foundation for a data-driven culture here at HOLZRICHTER Berlin."
A culture is the sum of all people, and by that metric, HOLZRICHTER Berlin has truly democratized its data culture. "By visualizing important KPIs with BigQuery and Looker Studio, we went from 20% to 100% of our employees having access to important business insights," says Korduan. "Instead of chasing data elsewhere, our employees can focus on insights and make data-driven decisions independently."
"By visualizing important KPIs with BigQuery and Looker Studio, we went from 20% to 100% of our employees having access to important business insights. Instead of chasing data elsewhere, our employees can focus on insights and make data-driven decisions independently."
—Alexander Korduan, founder and CEO, HOLZRICHTER BerlinExpanding in style with Google Cloud and Seibert Media
HOLZRICHTER Berlin is a young company with big ambitions. In the coming years, Korduan and his team want to open up new marketing channels, take the company's ever-evolving leather collection to new markets across the EU, and start selling to business customers on top of its B2C focus. To succeed, HOLZRICHTER Berlin and its employees will need to make strategic decisions based on data insights, and those are no longer in short supply.
"The more control you have over your data, the more empowered you feel as a team," says Korduan. "With Google Cloud and Seibert Media, we've achieved a new level of data transparency here at HOLZRICHTER Berlin, enabling our employees to leverage accessible insights to make better decisions, faster. And that's a great foundation for our future success."
"The more control you have over your data, the more empowered you feel as a team. With Google Cloud and Seibert Media, we've achieved a new level of data transparency here at HOLZRICHTER Berlin, enabling our employees to leverage accessible insights to make better decisions, faster. And that's a great foundation for our future success."
—Alexander Korduan, founder and CEO, HOLZRICHTER BerlinTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About HOLZRICHTER Berlin
HOLZRICHTER Berlin believes that the best bags are made for life. Using 100% natural, vegetable-tanned materials, HOLZRICHTER Berlin sells timeless leather products at affordable prices, exclusively offered online.
About Seibert Media
Seibert Media helps companies to select, implement, and scale cloud solutions to solve their most pressing business challenges and innovate for the future.