A data warehouse reboot for a leader in printing

Shutterfly is one of the USA’s leading photography product shops, supplying consumers with canvases, photo books, business cards, and other printed products. 

Within the Shutterfly parent company also lives brands like Borrow Lenses, Lifetouch, and Shutterfly Business Solutions. Collectively, they have millions of customers, many purchasing across the Shutterfly brand portfolio. 

Shutterfly found itself with an aging and unreliable analytics infrastructure that was no longer serving its business. The outdated system slowed product rollouts, created challenges for marketing, and was expensive to maintain. They needed a modern, automated system to reduce manual labour and improve business intelligence across its brands. 

DEPT®/DATA worked alongside the data team at Shutterfly to migrate their cloud data warehouse. This enabled us to refactor and rationalise existing data pipelines into a new, integrated data platform. 

By connecting multiple data sources, the marketing team could see one master customer list with tracked activities across all brands. This allowed teams to understand shared users, create more relevant offers, and improve marketing efficiencies. 

Perhaps most importantly, Shutterfly was able to reorganise and revitalise its data engineering team. With streamlined data systems, the team was positioned to respond more quickly to changing business and market needs.