How Insider partnered with deX to deliver business value through data

By Isabela Ducret, Chief of Staff at deX Labs

Insider is a Brazilian e-commerce company that has been developing tech apparel since 2017, with their customers’s everyday life in mind. They have sold to more than 500,000 customers in Brazil and around the world. They want to deliver the right product, so they are constantly iterating on their offerings.

This vision can only be achieved through technology. And technology is present not only in the fabric and design of the garments, but also in the way they operate. Insider’s founders understand the importance of organizing their data to create business value.

In early 2023, their one-person data team needed help. Although they had a working data infrastructure, it was built using unorthodox tools and was already out of date. They struggled to ingest new data, integrate with their DataLake, and hiring someone to fix these problems was too expensive and time-consuming.

Enters deX

That’s when they found deX. According to Felipe Antunes, Insider’s VP of growth, partnering with deX allowed them to stop worrying about their data infrastructure and architecture.

“It’s one less thing for us to worry about, so we can delegate it to super-specialized people in a very scalable and sustainable way”.

Felipe Antunes, Insider’s VP of Growth

In a matter of months, deX has completely changed the game for Insider with our end-to-end serverless data platform. We started ingesting all the data they needed, coming from strategic vendors, their website and ad platforms, and making it available to the team.

Next, with the right tools built-in the platform, we created a Data Lakehouse, build integrations between all the data sources and used that to get the right business insights. This allowed Insider to see the entire customer journey, from the moment they first saw an ad online to the delivery of their purchase. To name just a few examples, it was possible to attribute sales to marketing campaigns, identify customers who abandoned their purchases, track product inventory, and evaluate acquisition costs and product performance, which are so important for continuous improvement.

Moreover, due to multiple data sources and providers in Insider, there were discrepancies in equivalent information, leading to a lack of confidence in the data. The new model rectified this by enabling the extraction of accurate and reliable data.

It was also crucial to handle all sensitive data in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), regardless of the operating location. As per the regulation, data must be stored in its country of origin. We also altered their cloud data storage methods to be more cost-effective.

“Today, we can build new data pipelines, ingest new data sources, and expand. Hiring and the onboarding of new people is also much faster because we don’t need very specific skills. This allows us to grow with the future in mind,” said Antunes.

Delivering value beyond the data infrastructure

It was also important to create autonomy for Insider to work with their pipelines and gain a deeper understanding of their data infrastructure.

“[Our interaction with deX] was very good from the start. One of the crucial aspects was their knowledge of best practices for organizing data. It’s easy for those just starting out without engineering knowledge to be uncertain about what to do,”

Nicholas Domene, Insider’s Data Scientist.

This understanding and maturity allowed them to grow their data team from 1 to 5 people.

“First, we had to get this data into our organisation. We solved that problem with deX, and it allowed us to focus on creating value from that data”

Felipe Antunes

Now, thanks to deX’s managed platform, Insider can concentrate on what truly matters: transforming the way we think about and consume fashion, by offering the best product and the right insights.