ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Robling announced today that national specialty retailer Hot Topic has selected Robling Data as a Service (DaaS), a purpose-built solution designed to speed retailers’ journey to holistic, omni-channel analytics and reporting.
With more than 600 stores nationwide and a thriving e-commerce business, Hot Topic offers band-related apparel and accessories, licensed merchandise, and fashion apparel and accessories.
After rapid expansion, Hot Topic wanted to increase insight into store operations and speed up reporting systems. This required integrating disconnected sources and automating cumbersome, manual reporting processes.
With its growing e-commerce business, Hot Topic also needed deeper, more granular insight into e-commerce operations and a way to connect the experience of customers across all its channels, including in-store and online experiences.
"Traditional tools like spreadsheets were no longer sufficient for the needs of a complex, omni-channel business like ours," said Mike Yerkes, Chief Operating Officer, Hot Topic. “It could take hours, even days, to run and assemble weekly reports that were critical to the business.”
Instead of adopting a point solution or migrating data as-is to the cloud, Hot Topic decided to take a more holistic approach. With Robling DaaS—designed specifically for retailers—Hot Topic can quickly and cost-effectively make data analytics-ready from across all its key systems, from merchandising, e-commerce and supply chain to customer experience and financials.
Hot Topic also selected Robling partner Looker, a unified, next-gen data analysis platform that delivers actionable business insights to employees at the point of decision. Because of Robling’s pre-built integrations with Looker as well as Looker’s modern, intuitive, self-service-driven UI, Hot Topic is democratizing insights while also speeding implementation, adoption and time-to-value.
As a DaaS solution, Robling enables Hot Topic with a modern, extremely cost-effective cloud-based retail analytics solution. It also provides instant elasticity, enterprise-scale security and usage-based pricing, thanks to its partnership with Snowflake, the leading cloud-built data warehouse.
"With Robling, we can maintain a lean reporting and technical group, even as we unleash all our critical data to optimize store operations and support the connected, omnichannel experiences our customers have come to expect," said Yerkes.
“We are delighted to have been chosen by Hot Topic as their partner in enabling next-generation omnichannel analytics,” said Robling CEO Jeff Buck. “We’ve built deep retail domain knowledge and decades of data warehousing know-how into Robling DaaS, designing it from the ground up to deliver the business context Hot Topic’s business users and data analysts need for truly data-driven decision making."
Learn more about Robling's purpose-built retail DaaS solution.
About Hot Topic®
Hot Topic is a national specialty retailer specializing in band-related apparel and accessories, licensed merchandise, and fashion apparel and accessories. Founded in 1989 in a Southern California garage, Hot Topic is headquartered in Los Angeles and now has more than 600 stores nationwide and employs over 10,000 associates.
About Robling
Robling helps retailers become truly data-driven organizations with its purpose-built retail data as a service (DaaS) solution hosted on Snowflake’s powerful, elastic low-cost cloud platform. With Robling DaaS, retailers can unlock net-new value by unifying and operationalizing data across merchandising, e-commerce, customer and supply chain systems. Robling founders CEO Jeff Buck and Chief Design Officer Juan Pereira previously co-founded QuantiSense, the leading analytics application for specialty retailers. QuantiSense was #1 on RIS News Software Leaderboard before being acquired by Epicor in 2014. Robling customers include Fresh Thyme, Hot Topic, and a top ten U.S. department store. To learn more, visit robling.io.
