Rittman Analytics Helps Rixo Create A Single View Of Its Trading Operations

The Download

Founded in 2015 by London College of Fashion graduates Henrietta Rix and Orlagh McCloskey, Rixo is a fashion brand based out of London, England famous for hand-painted prints, premium materials and vintage-inspired silhouettes that counts Taylor Swift, Lily James and the Duchess of Cambridge as fans.

Started as a passion project run from the living room of their London flat Rixo had, by 2019, grown quickly into business with an international ecommerce presence, physical stores in London and plans for more together with a wholesale business with two warehouses.

Rixo's Plans For Data-Driven Growth

Rixo now had a need to monitor revenue streams, stock levels, and their retail and ecommerce activity, whilst also having a desire to innovate and improve their business via analysis of the data those activities produced.

As a fast-growing startup, Rixo had, however, no in-house analytics capability or tools and relied instead on the limited analytics features that came with the software services that powered their website and retail stores.

These in-app analytics were usable for basic monitoring but their lack of cohesion and disconnected nature made making decisions requiring a joined-up view of the business difficult.

What Rixo needed was a centralised and joined-up view of their data, organised for decision-making and capable of handling ecommerce-specific data challenges such as:

• Linking returns to sales
• Reporting gift cards not as revenue, but as payments for subsequent orders
• Implementing the 4-5-4 week retail calendar used for like-for-like reporting

and then presented to business users as intuitive, self-service dashboards and reports.

Experts In The Modern Data Stack

Rixo partnered with Rittman Analytics, a Google Cloud Partner based in Brighton, United Kingdom with extensive experience delivering modern data stack solutions for high-growth retail and online businesses such as Rixo.

Focusing first on meeting Rixo's retail and ecommerce business and key business metrics, such as sales revenue and margin, unit and order volumes, and new and existing customer splits, Rittman Analytics implemented a data analytics solution built on a modular and flexible foundation of Google Cloud and partner data warehousing and data analytics technologies.

Rittman Analytics was able to set up flexible connections to the various data sources using Data Virtuality, store their data in Google BigQuery, and then use dbt Core and dbt Cloud to standardise and transform those sources into a structure optimised to answer business questions.

We were also able to adapt this solution as new data sources were added and provide guidance on how best to structure an in-house data team for Rixo. Overall, Rixo's considered this first phase of our engagement to be "a very comprehensive condensation of what was previously a sprawling mess of unused data sources and disconnected software."

Delivering Rixo's Trade Pack KPIs

Rixo's new Data Team is now collaborating with Rittman Analytics on building out an automated Trade Dashboard KPI pack comprising a set of Looker dashboards that provide high-level Trade process KPIs along with more detailed KPIs for specific parts of that process.

Every Tuesday, Rixo conducts an extensive analysis of the previous week's performance, focusing on various aspects like online and in-store sales, advertising efficiency, brand development, and wholesale distribution. This process, crucial for strategic decision-making, required a significant manual effort.

Around a third of Rixo's head office staff dedicated between half and all of their time on Mondays to compile this data in the form of a slide pack for review.

The complexity in this task lay in needing to amalgamate data from diverse sources including Netsuite, Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, Shopify, Google Ads, Meta Ads, and Ometria.

Data in most cases needed manual manipulation and standardisation in Microsoft Excel along with the application of business rules on customer and revenue definitions specific to Rixo.

Rittman Analytics partnered with Rixo to enhance their data engineering capabilities and streamline the analytics delivery process. Their role was pivotal in integrating new data pipelines into Rixo's existing data warehouse and combining them with the platform infrastructure developed in the first phase of their engagement.

As well as providing guidance for Rixo's data team as they took on management of the delivery program, a significant part of Rittman Analytics' contribution was in developing a clear roadmap for future data connectivity and expansion of the platform, ensuring that new data sources were efficiently integrated and the warehouse was ready for future growth.

According to Alex Macartney, Data Analyst at Rixo, "Rittman Analytics's expertise and experience with building out data infrastructure has massively sped up the timeframe in which we are able to implement the Trade Dashboard. Their ways of working and engineering methodologies have set a terrific foundation for the project and have really acted as a force multiplier by enabling the Rixo Data Team to function above their expected level. Furthermore, they have been incredibly generous with their knowledge and are always willing to pass on best practice or tips to the Rixo Data Team"