Challenge: As a startup beauty brand, Odele needed to leverage its sales and inventory data in order to best serve its customers and stay competitive with its large corporate competitors.

Solution: Thanks to Domo, Odele has been able to save time and broaden its insights beyond general sales performance down to the SKU, store, regionality, and promotion level at a glance.

Impact: Odele can now see which products are selling and why so it can predict future sales, better manage inventory, and inform promotions.

Odele makes its business shine with Domo.

If you’re like most people, your shower stall is packed with dozens of different shampoos, conditioners, and body washes for every member of your family. Frustrated by all these bottles for themselves, their partners, and their children, the founders of Odele set out to create a clean beauty brand that delivers premium products everyone can love, all at an affordable price.

Odele’s founders came from a corporate CPG background and knew the importance data would play in bringing their new brand to the broadest audience possible. “In corporate America, you have to make a case with data in a very succinct way for anything you want to do,” said Odele co-founder Britta Chatterjee. “That’s something we wanted to keep with Odele, because there’s so much power to data.”

While only two years old, this startup is applying those lessons by using Domo to put data at the foundation of their business. As a result, it has quickly grown from concept to being on the shelves of major retailers like Target and featured on the Today Show. “At first, Domo was about saving time so that we could make quicker decisions,” Chatterjee said. “Now it’s about driving decisions to ensure every dollar we spend is being spent in the best possible way.”

While Odele’s founders knew they wanted to build a data-driven business from the outset, they struggled at the beginning with spreadsheets that were unwieldy, time-consuming, and extremely frustrating. “Every Monday, I would take our retail reports, clean and code the data, assign unique roles to the data, and then plug it into another spreadsheet. My entire Mondays were completely taken up with this process,” Chatterjee said. “I was spending all of my time trying to model out something that my capabilities in Excel were incapable of doing. Now that we have Domo, I can check it every day to see what it is telling me.”

Silky smooth sales performance.

Odele’s founders use Domo to broaden their insights beyond general sales performance down to the SKU, store, and promotion level. This allows them to see the impact of changes in pricing and promotions on sales velocity at both high- and low-volume stores so they can better predict future sales performance.

“Collecting data in retail is so important because it informs every decision you need to make on a daily basis. Having it in real time gives us insight into what we can suggest to our retail partners in order to drive business forward, helps us plan for different scenarios, and helps us anticipate with confidence how different products will perform,” said Odele co-founder Lindsay Holden.

Holden uses Domo to track sales performance to inform future assortment recommendations and promotional activity. A productivity dashboard shows if a specific promotion or discount translates into the sales lift that was originally forecasted so Odele can test, learn, and iterate on promotional and product placement strategies.

“We recently had the opportunity to be on an endcap, which was new for us, so we didn’t really know what it was going to do. Domo helped show us right out of the gate how accurate our forecasts were, and where there was variance and dig into the why.” Holden said.

“Now we can look for opportunities for similar experiences to help us realize that same level of sales growth and effectively prepare for them to protect the upside.”

Taking the tangle out of inventory management.

As a new brand, Odele must ensure its products are always on the shelf. Not only is it critical to keep products in stock to build customer habits and drive revenue, but inventory management plays a key role in Odele’s ability to build the retailer relationships required to gain favorable shelf space over competitors.

Odele uses Domo to track inventory on a store-by-store basis to identify where it needs to send additional products or redeploy products from low-performing stores to higher-performing markets. It also helps Odele determine if the reason sales are down at a specific location is because it is out-of-stock or if there’s a deeper issue that needs to be addressed.

“Domo has brought so much visibility to our inventory management,” said Chatterjee. “It allows us to prioritize where we send inventory so we send it to the places that will drive the most dollars for our business. We can see where out-of-stocks are happening in a very visual way, making it easy to make decisions on where to prioritize where we send products.”

Thanks to Domo, Odele has been able to ensure that its products are on the right shelves as often as possible. This has helped Odele stand out from other startup brands in the eyes of retailers. “It’s so important for retailer relationships to be able to show that you can compete with the big guys. You have to be prepared to play within big retail, and that requires really good data,” Chatterjee said.

Coming clean with vendor reporting.

While Odele tracks its performance down to the SKU and location level, it knows that retailers often have hundreds of thousands of SKUs under one roof, which means they don’t have the time to pay that same level of attention.

“We scrutinize every SKU based on historical performance, promotions, and locations,” Holden said. “When we see forecasts coming from a retailer, we’re empowered to have great discussions to help adjust the forecast if needed. This protects us for future opportunities while helping maximize sales.”

Insights in style.

Thanks to Domo, Odele’s founders say they now have the time and insight required to build their business the way they envisioned.

“Domo has freed up so much of our time,” Holden said

“When I think about life before Domo and after Domo, the biggest difference is peace of mind,” Chatterjee said. “We know what’s happening within our business, and have a place to go to answer really critical questions. Domo helps me sleep better at night.”