Divbrands saves the equivalent of three full-time data engineers and boosts Return on Ad Spend by 15 % with Fivetran

“To ensure that we use the best-in-class tools for our data stack, we evaluate the market on a regular basis. For data movement, the result is always the same: Fivetran is best-in-class.” 

Gus Fune, CTO at Divbrands

Key results: 

• Saved time for building and maintaining data pipelines equivalent to three full-time data engineers
• Granular, detailed and accurate data is available much faster, enabling Divbrands to proactively iterate and optimize Marketing ROI
• Since rolling out Fivetran, near real-time data allows Divbrands to address issues within minutes – instead of days
• Seamless addition of new sources with minimal manual intervention
• Regular market evaluations show that: Fivetran is the best-in-class data movement platform
  

Background:

• Industry: eCommerce
• Company Size: 79 employees
• Departments supported: Marketing, Sales, Customer Support, Product Development, Business Operations, Management
• Sources: Stripe, PayPal, order management system, product information system, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Pinterest Ads
• Destination: Google BigQuery
• BI Tool: Looker Studio
• Data Transformation Tool: dbt
• Use cases: product development, advertising effectiveness, marketing performance, customer support, process optimization
  

Since 2017, Divbrands, a DTC Venture Studio, creator and operator of Hyper Arch Motion, has launched hundreds of brands, which they retail from custom built landing pages and online stores. The company’s sole focus is on providing consumers with products and content that  they really want, using an in-house creative team to make ads that are trained on AI and customer interaction data. They operate in 19 countries around the world with 79 experts that live the company’s credo: “No Big Egos. Just Big Data.” Rather than making emotional decisions, they combine data analysis with the art of copywriting, branding, creativity, and end-to-end business excellence.

What is the company’s formula for success?  A perfect example is their latest product – the new range of orthopedic sneakers, Hyper Arch Motion^TM. Divbrands developed this innovation with its partners based on feedback from more than 100,000 women around the world. Most of them suffer from plantar fasciitis or heel pain, gout, arthritis or arch pain, wide or flat feet. But in spite of all the discomfort and pain the majority do not switch to orthopedic shoes mainly for aesthetic reasons. That's why Divbrands has developed Hyper Arch Motion. This innovative sneaker absorbs 30% more impact than any other orthopedic shoe and is at the same time very stylish. The Hyper Arch Motion has become a huge success as evidenced by sales figures and overwhelmingly positive feedback from customers. Divbrands uses the customer feedback to further improve Hyper Arch Motion and future product line extensions.‍

Running a data-driven company with just one person responsible for data

To achieve success like this, Divbrands needs to collect all relevant data in a single place. "Easier said than done. Getting all the data from a variety of tools and solutions onto a single platform is very time-consuming. But that's not all. We also need to ensure that the data is consistent and reliable. Fivetran does this job really well," said Gus Fune, CTO at Divbrands.

Thanks to Fivetran, Divbrands gets by with just one person in charge of the data and never has to rely on external resources. As a matter of fact, the company is just now hiring its first data engineer to handle the growing complexity of its data infrastructure. "Fivetran will make our new colleague’s tasks easier, and they can focus entirely on the technical tasks."

Real-time data enables proactive action

Divbrands currently moves about 70 million active records per month. Data is synchronized every five to ten minutes depending on the connector. It's very important for the teams to have near real-time data available. "With Fivetran, we can identify any potential problem within minutes. In the old world this would have taken days if not months and we had to try to fix things after the fact. With Fivetran, we can be truly proactive," said Fune.

Divbrands has more than 30 connectors in use with new ones being added regularly as the company grows. The most important connectors are Stripe and PayPal, their order management and product management systems, and advertising platforms (Google Ads, TikTok Ads, Facebook Ads, Pinterest Ads). This makes it very easy for Divbrands to keep track of KPIs (e.g. ROAS) at all times and optimize them in a targeted manner. The result: an increase in ROAS by 15 % over the last 18 months.

‍Deep dive into data

What Daniel Shinoda, Data Scientist at Divbrands, likes most about Fivetran is that he can create custom reports for Google Ads. The predefined tables from the API are crude and sometimes not granular enough. Fivetran allows him to add a geographic layer, for example. "If we see a spike in sales, we can even figure out if it was sunny or rainy in that location at that time. This ability to customize data analysis allows us to continuously optimize our marketing and sales efforts,” Fune added.  

Stripe and PayPal provide payment data. It is extremely important that this data is consistent and reliable. That's the reason Divbrands chose Fivetran's PayPal connector as soon as it hit the market. "We will definitely do this with other connectors because it's easier and more reliable with Fivetran," said Shinoda.