Overstock.com, Inc., one of the world’s premier home goods and furnishings retailers, chose Snowflake to scale and expedite its data science initiatives. With Snowflake, Overstock can fast-track highly impactful data science projects that allow it to deliver on its brand promise of using technology to help customers find just what they want, for less. Overstock joins fellow online retailers Rue La La and Rent the Runway in leveraging Snowflake’s modern cloud data warehouse solution.
“A common meme in the data science world is that data scientists spend 80% of their time prepping data and 20% of their time building models, and we wanted to flip that ratio” said Joe Kambeitz, Overstock’s Vice President of Product and Analytics. “A key part of that initiative was investing in the right tools for our data scientists, and Snowflake is that tool when it comes to allowing data scientists to rapidly scale and deploy their workloads.”
Overstock uses Snowflake’s cloud-built data warehouse to easily load and integrate structured and semi-structured data in one place for quick and powerful analysis. Snowflake’s clone and time-travel capabilities allow Overstock’s data scientists to independently and simultaneously work on their own golden data set. The platform’s elastic compute and linear scaling capabilities enable unlimited parallelism and unmatched performance, allowing Overstock’s data scientists to move faster than ever. Packaging complex features for new data science models now occurs within hours or days, compared to the weeks it could take before partnering with Snowflake.
“Everything we do is about understanding our customers better in order to deliver the best possible shopping experience,” said JP Knab, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Overstock. “Data has always been the frontier in e-commerce and we need to be able move faster in leveraging data to deliver optimal customer experiences. Snowflake makes it so that activities that could previously require months of hardware and pipeline implementation now occur instantly by simply spinning up a new cluster.”
“E-commerce companies sit on massive troves of data. The successful, customer-centric businesses transform that data into meaningful and actionable insight to make informed business decisions,” Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia said. “Overstock has stockpiled nearly 20 years’ worth of data, demanding a modern data warehousing solution that enables its data science team to work quickly and uncover insights and trends across the data’s lifetime.”
