BROOKLINEN, Inc. Growing Data Team

Location: New York, United States

 

Industry: Bedding products, Lifestyle & health

 

Founded: 2014

 

Website: https://www.brooklinen.com/pages/about

 

Having Brooklinen as a customer and a partner over the past year was Joon’s honor. At the time when we first started working with Brooklinen, the team was in need of data reporting for sales. But as the team was new and with internal data investment, there was much to do, including hiring, onboarding, and setting up the data pipeline for the start. Therefore, the team decided to move forward with Joon Service. 

After one year, the Brooklinen team is now able to centralize data from different departments and sources and a single source of truth. They are also able to generate different reports for different departments as the team grow bigger independently. We had a chance to conduct an exit interview with Luke Summerlin, Lead Analytics at Brooklinen. Luke currently leads a team of 4 other analysts. His team supports growth marketing, retention, operation, merchandising, and digital product, doing most of the analytics parts, reporting, dashboard, experimentation, ad-hoc analysis, etc.

Joon: How was it working with Joon Solutions?

Luke: It was great. It was exactly the solution that we needed. We had a kind of call to bring things together internally, but we needed some kind of support to get through the first year of that progress, and Joon helped us with that. It is really easy to communicate with them, just like through Monday meetings, biweekly meetings, the Trello board, or slack. The team is very accessible, really easy to work with, and definitely didn’t hit any problems. 

We didn’t have a strong plan from our end so we appreciate Joon’s flexibility in meeting us where we are at rather than trying to like put some structure and rigidity in place without understanding the context of our business relationship with maturity of the company. So it was really easy to work together. We got the team like access to all of our tools and they are up to speed very quickly, able to make adjustment, easy to communicate and work with through calls, or slack to chat with. Overall, it was really beneficial.

Joon: How did you hear about Joon?

Luke: I believe Fish Town, now known as dbt Labs, had connected us to Joon, because we used to work with them so we trusted their opinion.

Joon: Could you please share what business challenge that your company currently have or what were the major pain points of your business/your team before working with Joon?

Luke: We had no investment in analytics internally. We had people working with some different tools and some different data sources and it was a bit like a mess. Our data maturity was far far behind our data maturity. So we had made like a call to do investment in our data that would require a lot of hiring, restructuring and onboarding. So Joon helped us set that up. Some of data connection, build data mode in dbt so that we could still move forward with our analytics progress while also trying to hire and build out an internal team. So pre-Joon, we were barely using Looker at all. And we did have some data in Snowflake and some basic data model in dbt. They helped us work through some new data model and coporate new data sources that enable us to build out more reporting. So Joon enable a lot of reporting that the analytics team also lated ending doing as well. So really helped us expertise the process of getting more report.

Joon: How have Joon helped you to achieve your business goal?

Luke: For business goal, first we had centralized reporting that we all trust. We meet few thrives here. This time last year we had no reporting in Looker, right now we have a lot of dashboards that are used daily in Looker for order revenue, for site performance from our marketing performance, for retention performance, for merchandising and operations and logistics to make huge drive on that fun of centralizing our reporting, automating it, making sure it standardised, usable 

As we continue to fill in the gap of reporting, we will be able to be a lot of like self-service, data usage as a company so that the analysts can focus more on proactive analysis, exploring data and finding opportunities rather being reactive and playing catch up.

Joon: What are you looking forward to further development? 

Luke: We continue connecting new data sources, continue building data models as well as expand upon our reporting on Looker. We will start making more like explorer so people can self-service. We already started doing internal education at our company so people are empowered to do the tool themselves, and then from there, it is just like opening up more analytics bandwidth to be able to focus on bigger, complicated analytics problems so we can be creating analysis, building memos and decks, finding out opportunities rather than just like reporting.

Joon: Thank you so much for your sharing. Do you have any other feedback for us? 

Luke: I really enjoy the engagement. I think you all are the exact partner that we were looking for. Specifically the team, everyone is really friendly, eager to help, and really collaborative, so overall, it was a super positive experience for us. I think if we could do the engagement over, the changes would be like on our end to be able to be more future-looking and be able to build out more of a plan. I am sure you all felt that as frustration from time to time where we were so reactive as an organization but unfortunately, that is the nature of where analytics was, we were like trying to catch up whereas like the company is several years old but the analytics is brand new so I appreciate Joon’s commitment with us through that process and for not having like more than few weeks of the most plan all the time. I would love to have that drawn back to have the foresight. But I am not sure how possible that would be. There is a saying, it is always easier to look at than when you are in the moment.