Urban Outfitters—headquartered in Philadelphia—is a successful retailer with over 130 stores in the United States, Canada, and Europe. They’re also the parent company of Anthropologie, Free People, and Terrain.
But they had a problem. They needed a better way to connect with their customers and understand customer behavior. They found it with data analysis software from Fortra.
Challenge: Get to Know the Customer
Who’s buying the products? Are they making returns? When they return products, do they purchase something else while in the store?
These are the questions that Urban Outfitters needed the answers to. But, they couldn’t get to the answers quickly enough. It kept them from seeing overall trends and making informed decisions about their products.
That all changed when they got Sequel.
Solution: Accurate Data Reports with Clear Trends
Urban Outfitters needed a data analysis tool that would work with their IBM i system and Island Pacific ERP system. It also needed to work with other retail applications on other servers, like MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server.
Sequel fit the description and surpassed their expectations by being really simple to use.
Tom Gould, an IT Business Analyst at Urban Outfitters, creates reports constantly to meet the company’s needs. Sequel makes sure that he can do it quickly and easily—without manually programming in SQL. All he needs to do is navigate the intuitive graphical user interface.
I can read SQL, but I can't write it. But I can do all these queries and build reports with Sequel because Sequel generates the SQL for me.
Tom Gould, IT Business Analyst, Urban Outfitters
Tom can summarize the data and drill down into the details himself. Or he can pass the report on to the employee who requested it—and empower him or her to analyze the data, too. He can even deliver it to them in Microsoft Excel. And “they just love it!”
Sequel training also made it easy for Tom to get up-to-speed and get the entire company going on Sequel.
When I first started working with Sequel, I went to Chicago for training and I've been learning on my own ever since. They've really helped me learn to use more features of Sequel over the years. I love the support and products!
Tom Gould, IT Business Analyst, Urban Outfitters
Results: Greater Insight, Better Decisions
Now that Urban Outfitters has Sequel, they can squeeze every drop of insight out of every report.
For instance, it was easy for Tom to create a report analyzing direct return transactions. It calculated how many direct returns there were. But it also went beyond that to detail how many sales there were (if any) within each return transaction. That helped Urban Outfitters figure out if they’re making money when somebody returns an item.
It’s insight like that that helps Urban Outfitters understand customer behavior and make better decisions for long-term success.
Make the Right Decisions for Your Business
See for yourself how Sequel makes it easy to analyze data and gain insight.