Case Study

Fashion Retailer Hush Keeps On Trend With SnapLogic’s Data Integration Platform

Hush Backstory

Founded 19 years ago by Mandy Watkins, an Australian who found herself needing a new wardrobe to combat the British winter, Hush is a fashion and lifestyle brand for women. Hush has grown rapidly to over 100 employees and now has private equity capital to further boost its growth. The company sells its merchandise primarily through its e-commerce platform, but also has a presence in physical retail via department store concessions.

The Challenge

Success in business can create new pressures. When Hush, which sells online in the UK and Europe and in John Lewis department stores, saw its e-commerce sales grow rapidly between 2020 and 2022 during the pandemic, old IT systems struggled to cope with demand.

The company hired two experienced IT executives from Superdry, a British fashion retailer, to lead the IT overhaul, including Brad Woodward, now the head of data at Hush. “The IT priorities were to improve data and data reporting,” Woodward said. “Data was very difficult for people to access.”

Hush needed flexible, powerful and reliable software that could knit together its IT systems, collate data and help it better understand its customers and running costs.

The Solution

Woodward and the Hush team wanted an app and data integration tool that would allow them to swiftly extract data from business systems and load it to a data warehouse. They picked SnapLogic for its IT integration software because it could “do simple things quickly” and also handle more complex tasks that require more “finesse,” Woodward said.

Part of their decision was Woodward’s view that competitor products could perform simple tasks, but only SnapLogic had advanced capabilities.

For example, SnapLogic loads data into Hush’s data warehouse to make it available for analytics. By linking the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, customer relationship management (CRM) system, Google Analytics, and Google’s cloud-based data warehouse technology, Hush is able to effectively spot bottlenecks in supply chains or spikes in demand for a specific product.

Business Results

After SnapLogic’s installation in 2021, Hush quickly started seeing benefits, including:

• SnapLogic’s versatility, described by Woodward as a “Swiss army knife for IT”
• Significant reduction in time and effort employees spend rekeying data into IT systems
• Quick access to accurate data on sales, finance, supply chain, and procurement

Now, Hush’s data is all stored in one place and constantly updated, helping the company operate more efficiently and provide accurate financial data to its investors. Information retrieval that used to take days or even weeks can now be done in a couple of minutes.

“Recently, someone in our business asked me for a view of sales figures in a unit of our business, by sales channel and fiscal months for the last three years,”

Woodward said. “They thought it would be a big request, but I provided the information in about five minutes.”

Customers also benefit. Hush sources most of its stock from other countries, and takes time to reach warehouses in Europe and the UK. If IT systems are out of sync, a customer may see an item on the website and order it, only to be later told that the

item is out of stock; a frustrating experience for any customer, and a lost sale for Hush. Additionally, click-and-collect orders, where customers collect online orders from various parcel collection points, also require up-to-date and reliable data.

SnapLogic helps Hush ensure that customers get the products they want — when they want them.