Hunkemöller: Making the journey into data-driven innovation with Google Cloud

Hunkemöller—a Dutch intimate apparel brand founded in 1886—is one of the leading market specialists in lingerie. Present in 19 countries, the company has more than 900 stores, mainly located in Europe. It's not only recognized for its quality, brand history, and social commitment, but also for its innovative initiatives in product design and customer service, as well as digital transformations. Hunkemöller adopted an omnichannel strategy very early on, capitalizing on its own boutiques, franchise stores, and e-commerce sites to develop brand awareness. In order to achieve its ambitions, it also placed data at the heart of its strategy, making the most of a traditional internal data platform.

Modernizing data architecture to overcome new challenges

Hunkemöller's traditional on-prem data platform was limiting the company's ability to transform, innovate, and adapt to market trends. The data was also fragmented across multiple systems, making it difficult to extract valuable customer journey insights.

Over the years, this architecture gradually became a hindrance. Lacking agility, it no longer met the company's needs, as Dwan Thompson, Data and Analytics Leader at Hunkemöller, explains: "We needed to gain significantly more business value from first- and third-party data through smart analytics and AI. To achieve this, we needed a single, scalable data stack that would allow us to develop and implement advanced integrated solutions. When I arrived at Hunkemöller, the gap between what each business unit wanted to implement and what the data architecture was capable of providing was getting wider and wider." Supported in his approach by Devoteam G Cloud, a Google Cloud Preferred Partner, Hunkemöller embarked on a transformative journey to revolutionize its data and analytics landscape using Google Cloud.

The new infrastructure had to address a wide range of immediate needs, such as improving customer personalization, optimizing ad and acquisition campaigns, and managing stores in real-time. It also needed to support robust decision-making across all levels, from the board to departmental leaders, ensuring consistent steering KPIs. Finally, the solution required sufficient flexibility to adapt to future challenges, like integrating AI to drive future-focused solutions.

One source of truth with endless use cases

Built around Google Cloud, the new architecture resulted in a flexible, scalable, and agile modern data stack enabling market leading capabilities and acting as a unified view for decision-makers while maintaining rigorous security and data governance practices.

Development started by breaking the architecture into manageable blocks focusing on ingestion, orchestration, transformation, data warehousing, governance, BI, AI, and activation. Quick, fully vertical use cases were achieved by leveraging native Google Cloud integrations, such as Google Analytics, Ads, Search, and Trends. For other integrations, a mix of managed services and self-hosted tooling was used. Flows were managed by Cloud Composer orchestration service and Pub/Sub messaging service for real-time ingestion where appropriate. The result was the concentration of all of the company's first-party data assets combined with key enriching third-party data. This strategic move laid the groundwork for a robust data infrastructure, enabling the company to harness the power of BigQuery. By centralizing data into an ingestion layer, Hunkemöller gained the ability to build data concepts within a data warehouse layer, creating a foundation for a unified business vocabulary. This, in turn, supported the development of a semantic layer powered by Looker and LookML. This semantic layer serves as a single source of truth for the entire organization, ensuring everyone has access to consistent and accurate data definitions.

Finally, considering SAP serves as the backbone of its operations, Hunkemöller also uses Google Cloud Cortex—a set of services that makes it possible to build, deploy, and manage advanced analytic solutions using SAP data. A real accelerator of analytical solutions between SAP and Google Cloud, Google Cloud Cortex predominantly offers pre-designed models for reporting and creating dashboards with SAP data using Looker, as well as the ability to apply ML models with Vertex AI.

A managed platform industrializing data management

For Dwan Thompson, establishing a modern data stack on Google Cloud was a game-changer for Hunkemöller. "By taking this step, we gained the ability to develop advanced AI and analytics solutions that are owned by our company," he explained. "This capability eliminates the need to rely solely on external solutions, empowering us to tailor solutions that perfectly align with our unique business requirements and long-term strategic objectives."

To illustrate, Hunkemöller developed its own in-house privacy-centric customer data platform (CDP). This CDP eliminated pre-existing data silos, facilitating predictive marketing, digital commerce, advanced personalization, and innovative customer-centric solutions across the organization. By hosting the CDP on Google Cloud and integrating it with Vertex AI, Hunkemöller enabled development of predictive metrics, such as Propensity to Buy, which can be leveraged to optimize ad campaigns. Furthermore, by coupling server-side GTM with the Google Cloud data stack via Firestore, Hunkemöller can optimize acquisition campaigns based on margin versus turnover and enhance them further with Future Customer Lifetime Value (FLTV) calculated using the CDP and Vertex AI.

Making the most of any opportunity

Implemented over an 18-month period, "The new data architecture has immense potential because, from the point of view of security, integration, AI and scalability, the platform offers an unparalleled wealth of resources," explains Dwan Thompson. "Hunkemöller is an extraordinary brand that has shaped the evolution of lingerie over the past century. The new data infrastructure is a valuable asset that enables the business to stay ahead of the curve and drive growth, building upon its long legacy of innovation. This was the clear objective."

The vision for Hunkemöller data platform was clear: to create a foundation that would enable the company to harness the power of data to drive innovation, improve customer experiences, and optimize business operations. By leveraging Google Cloud's robust infrastructure and advanced data analytics tools, Hunkemöller gained the agility and scalability needed to meet the demands of a rapidly evolving retail landscape.