CLIENT CASE STUDY: HOW MINT VELVET LEVERAGE A SINGLE CUSTOMER VIEW
- Sarah Hughes
- Sep 3
- 6 min read
Mint Velvet is the home of Relaxed Glamour. Known for easy shapes, beautiful prints and flattering fits, all with thoughtful finishing touches, Mint Velvet make sense of fashion with an effortless style formula.
To make sense of the customer and provide a single customer view, Mint Velvet trust Datitude.
“Datitude are data experts. Their expertise in systems and data integration, as well as data management and analytics, has enabled Mint Velvet to gain a true single source of truth and unlock actionable insights to drive profitable growth in an ever-evolving digital world. Maddy Turley, Growth Director, Mint Velvet
Read on to find out more about Mint Velvet, the challenge of single customer view, Datitude's solution and how enables Mint Velvet to leverage a single customer view. You can also download a PDF of the case study here.
About Mint Velvet
The relaxed glamour concept was born in 2009 with the launch of one store and an ecommerce site. Fast forward to today, Mint Velvet are at the forefront of omnichannel retailing; delighting customers across multiple channels including 100+ standalone boutiques and concessions, and an expanding international presence (digital and physical). At its core is a relentless focus on amazing customer service and seamless, personalised, experiences wherever, and however, customers choose to shop.
Successfully growing the business and keeping pace with customer expectations has seen Mint Velvet transform itself digitally. They have adopted multiple best-of-breed solutions and re-platformed both their ecommerce platform (to Shopify) and store POS.
The Challenge of Single Customer View
Single customer view (also known as a 360°, or unified, view of the customer) is where data from multiple sources, both online and offline, is integrated, consolidated, cleansed and enriched into a single record.
Achieving that single view of the customer remains a challenge for many brands and retailers, held back by difficulties connecting, integrating and unifying online and offline data. Ever-expanding retail tech ecosystems, with different data types, structures, formats, and processes across multiple systems, add complexity and increase the risk of fragmented and siloed data.
Doing it well pays huge dividends. It’s key to better customer service, more personalised experiences and better marketing strategies that improve trust and loyalty, and drive profitable growth.
As an international, multichannel retailer, Mint Velvet know unified insights and a single customer view are fundamental to business success. They turned to Datitude for the solution.
Datitude’s Data Solution
Combining integration hub, data lakehouse and analytics services, Datitude’s platform pulls everything together in a single solution.
We connect, integrate, and unify source data from Mint Velvet’s core systems – standardising data sources, transforming data into a consumable state and providing a single version of the truth across customers, sales, and stock.
Integrations are streamlined and simplified through a single data repository. Data is ingested and shared between systems, and moved seamlessly between data stores and analytics services in real, and near-real-time.
This diagram provides a simplified overview of the data architecture.
Mint Velvet access their data through a Tableau front-end and Datitude’s proprietary Application and Excel add-in, with 50+ out-of-the-box workbooks automated as standard.
Datitude’s Application supports diverse user requirements through tools including:
report builder and data extract tool
dashboards (eg. real-time trading, direct mail and online marketing analytics)
customer cohort builder and CRM module
automated financial reconciliation.
Cutting Through The Data To…
Connect Customer Journeys and Improve Performance
Through Datitude’s solution, Mint Velvet effortlessly join the dots between digital and physical. They can easily build campaigns by channel, segment, discount type and product, and can better target more loyal, higher value customers, and with greater personalisation.
Rich trading insights and real-time customer analytics (like propensity to buy and accurate attribution) enables the marketing team to understand marketing’s true performance. They can plan campaigns more intelligently to optimise investment across email, direct mail and socials. Cold data selection and new customer acquisition is improved based on more accurate, real-time customer data.
Direct mail campaign results are processed immediately; and can be acted upon quickly by using the data to re-serve content and re-engage with customers on a more personalised level to improve omnichannel marketing performance.
The CRM module, using the customer database integration, provides powerful tools to understand customer behaviour, irrespective of channel, and to make decisions that drive profitable growth and more valuable customer relationships. From easy-to-interpret charts and reporting tools to individual customer records, and more! For example:
The Customer Value Map brings segments to life with a visual heat map giving powerful insight into the customers and prospects in any chosen extract.
Contact Manager has an easy-to-use search to find any customer or prospect. It displays a customer's full sales and returns history, lifetime value, segmentation data, subscriber status, campaign data, and how comparisons to Mint Velvet’s average customer.
Managing subscribers and changes to communication preferences across its business is a doddle too! Subscriber Centre provides a master record of all subscription events across all channels in one place.
Plus, Datitude pushes data from Subscriber Centre to other systems: Mint Velvet’s boutique and customer service teams can look up and capture subscriber requests directly. Marketeers can easily access visualisations to understand how subscribers are responding to, and engaging with, marketing campaigns, and the impact of this on lifetime value.
The Match-Back tool enables Mint Velvet to match a list of customers or orders to their database - useful, powerful, and timesaving for things like:
auditing affiliate claims for customer acquisition, and;
finding customer contact details from a list of orders when customer service teams want to quickly, and proactively, communicate with those customers.
Mint Velvet are champions of personalised, single-use promotion codes (in online and offline marketing campaigns) now Datitude has enabled them to seamlessly integrate these across ecommerce and POS systems.
As a result, they gain visibility of the true customer, they don’t give away margin unnecessarily and they can personalise campaign communications.
The customer experience is also enhanced because customers can use the codes through their preferred channel, and boutique and customer service teams can look up codes at the point of purchase if needed.
“Iconic British fashion brands, like Mint Velvet, understand the importance of integrating their data to build rich, ‘single view’ insight at an individual customer level. When a few years ago, we thought that digital was disrupting retail, it is now the customer who is the disruptor by redefining what they want from multichannel shopping journeys. Critically, meeting and exceeding consumer demands lies in being agile enough to act swiftly on these insights, to ensure that as well as achieving marketing ROI and customer acquisition, customers return again and again.” Sarah Hughes, Co-founder and Director, Datitude
A Trusted Data Partnership
Datitude’s managed data platform sits at the heart of Mint Velvet’s technology stack; keeping their data flowing by powering data integration, reports and analytics. By bringing data together in a single managed solution, Mint Velvet’s tech stack is optimised.
Using the customer data tools and analytics within Datitude’s platform, Mint Velvet respond to changes in the market and increase engagement with new and existing customers. They act on insights from its customer data, and so improve omnichannel shopping experiences.
As a partner, Datitude really stands out for their collaborative and innovative approach. The team are there when you need them and responsive. No challenge is too big for them and they’re adept at finding creative solutions.” Maddy Turley, Growth Director, Mint Velvet
Download a PDF of the case study here:
Our client page provides more information on our partnership with Mint Velvet.
About Datitude
We do data! Whatever your data needs, you can trust us to deliver.
Datitude’s award-winning data platform provides the unifying framework to connect, integrate and unify data. Data where it needs to be, on time, in the right format. The single source of truth across the whole business. No silos.
Combining an integration hub, data lakehouse and analytics services, it puts data at the heart of your tech stack and brings it to life with instant access to advanced analytics, BI and reports.
Built specifically for omnichannel retail, Datitude’s managed data platform is trusted by mighty retailers and fast-scaling brands who need better access to their data, and actionable insights they can rely on.
If you need to get more from your data, including a single customer view, talk to us!