Challenge:
In order to expand its sales from ecommerce to brick and mortar retailers, Blueair needed a data platform that would allow the company to scale.

Solution:
Blueair uses Domo to track sales performance, inventory, promotions and more across all its sales channels.

Impact:
Thanks to Domo, Blueair now has complete visibility into how its products perform down to the store level.

Blueair uses data to help people breathe easy thanks to Domo.

Blueair is on a mission to make indoor spaces more breathable thanks to its line of stylish, high-performing air purifiers. Today, that mission is more relevant than ever; the pandemic has shone a light on the need to improve indoor air quality, while wildfires make indoor air purification a must in many parts of the country.  

As a result, the company is quickly expanding into new retail locations, along with continuing to grow its ecommerce operations. Blueair relies on Domo to ensure that it can continue to meet customer demand and retailer expectations.

Preparing to scale. 

Blueair began using Domo just as the pandemic hit the United States, which itself was only a few months before a historic wildfire season, resulting in 600% sales growth in the last two years. While Blueair didn’t think they would grow so quickly, they knew then that their business was ready to scale, and needed a data solution in place that could scale along with them.  

Blueair partnered with the business intelligence consultancy MERGE to implement and maximize its use of Domo throughout the organization so that it could build a data-driven culture from the ground up. “We wanted to start our data journey before complexity sinks into the business,” said Daniel Espinosa, Head of Strategy, IT and Projects at Blueair.

Bringing sales data together.

One of Blueair’s primary goals with Domo was to use it to look at sales performance across disconnected sales channels, customer cohorts, and product types. The company knew that it had access to data from its major brick and mortar retailers, its ecommerce retailers, and its own direct-to-consumer platform, but it had no way to easily use that data to make decisions or anticipate trends.  

“The use of that data within our business did not really exist in some ways. For example, we used our Amazon sales data quite frequently, but didn’t use data from Best Buy or Target at all. We honestly struggled to even get that data,” Espinosa said.  
 
With Domo, Blueair can automatically ingest sales data from every channel, normalize it, and visualize it in a single dashboard for a true picture of their sales performance. Managers can dig into the data to slice it by product type, retailer, and geographic location, helping the company identify opportunities to redeploy inventory to areas of the country where their product is most in demand. 

“Blueair can take inventory data from a big box retailer and see where their product is stuck in distribution centers, and then use their other sales data to have a productive conversation with their buyers to show which stores they should redeploy product to,” said Grace Brockwell, Business Intelligence Strategist at MERGE. “It adds evidence to the conversation and makes Blueair a better partner to retailers.” 

As a result, Blueair reduced its out of stock numbers by double digits, helping the company improve its odds that its products will be on the shelves when a customer is ready to buy. “A buyer at a retailer is looking at our category, not Blueair specifically,” Espinosa said. “Domo lets us actively solve our out of stock issues at specific retailers at the store level, which is a huge win for us.”

Creating long term value.

In addition to the air purifier, Blueair sells replacement filters individually or as a subscription. Thanks to Domo, Blueair now has a far more accurate understanding of how these filter sales impact customer lifetime value.  

“We can see how frequently customers replace filters across each model, which allows us to experiment with marketing to see how to grow that number,” Espinosa said. “Subscription data can show us if people are upgrading devices and staying in the Blueair family, while retail data can tell us if promotions and discounts are driving one-time purchases or creating long-term customers.” 

Blueair uses Domo to carefully track the impact of promotions and pricing strategies at each location so it can continue to test out new combinations. Because the company has products for sale across multiple big box retailers totaling thousands of locations, Domo helps it track each active promotion so it can correlate any spike in sales with the action that inspired it. Blueair can even see the impact of where their product is placed within each store location itself. This data helps it advocate for preferred placement at stores where a location like an end cap will drive outsized results for the retailer compared to another product. 

“Domo helps us make smarter decisions about how to sell,” Espinosa said.