Simba Sleep

Simba Sleep has always been a data-driven company. Before the firm was even formally launched, the founders purchased research profiles from more than 10 million sleepers—including 180 million body profile data points.

The reason: when it comes to sleep, precision is critical. The company wanted to create the world’s best mattresses and sell them all over the world, and data was the key to perfecting the art of mattress making.

Today, data remains as important as ever at Simba, and the uses of data are growing quickly as the company expands into new markets such as Canada and China. Even as the number of online retail channels and data sources continues to spiral upward, Simba is now poised to keep pace — with Talend’s Stitch Enterprise as the cornerstone of its data integration strategy.

For small-to-mid-sized businesses like Simba, taming the complexities of data integration and management can seem overwhelming — particularly when you’re growing fast and you don’t have budget for highly skilled specialists in data engineering.

“We made the decision early on to invest in cloud-based solutions and not build everything ourselves,” said Tomasz Eitner, BI and Data Analyst at Simba. “Our data stack and the solutions we took on board were all designed to simplify data management so we could focus on business. Stitch was perfectly suited to our growth model.”

With Stitch as the data integration platform, Snowflake as the data warehouse, and dbt (data build tool) models connected to Tableau for BI, Simba was able to quickly integrate, aggregate and analyze data from multiple sources such as Shopify, eBay, and Zendesk.

Equally important, the Stitch Import API makes it easier to integrate custom data sources that may not yet be supported by Stitch. For Simba, that means added visibility over data produced in new markets. “We’re growing fast in China and Canada right now, and with Stitch we’re working on integrating popular platforms and apps in their markets, such as TMAll,” said Tomasz.

“Stitch made it easier to generate the daily PDF reports our CEO, CFO, and COO need to make decisions,” said Tomasz. “Most of the reports are sales-related, but we also do reports on conversion rates, return on investment, and so on.” Simba also uses Stitch to integrate data that is used to analyze marketing activities such as Google and Facebook ads.

“This may surprise you, but our executives are very aware of and interested in Stitch,” said Tomasz. “They depend on the reports that Stitch enables us to prepare, and they check their email frequently for the latest updates. In fact, for special events such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday, we have been asked to increase the frequency of reporting to every hour to show how we’re performing, and we can do that with Stitch.”

Stitch is also involved indirectly in the analysis of data to guide product development. “When customers provide feedback about our mattresses, the data goes into Stitch and then Tableau and is used by our product marketing team to make decisions about how to design or refine our mattresses,” said Tomasz.

Part of the appeal of Stitch was the quality of the support the company received from day one, according to Tomasz. “We have been working together for a long time, and Stitch has always provided great support,” he said. “When you’re a start-up and you’re growing like crazy you depend on your solution providers to be there for you, and that has always been true with Stitch.”

According to Tomasz, the support he has received from the Talend team has multiple benefits. “I’m not a data engineer,” he said, “so if there’s something happening in Stitch that I don’t understand, I need someone to walk me through what I need to do, step by step, to get the data flowing again. The Talend support team does that, and they save me a lot of time.

“But even more importantly, Talend is willing to work with us and be flexible. For example, because of our rapid growth we recently bumped into the Stitch capacity limit of 300 million rows. We needed to move up to Stitch Enterprise. But instead of immediately charging us more or making us wait until the end of the month until our contract was up, Talend gave us immediate access to 60 million more rows, so we could just keep going. That’s what I call five-star service, and it was super helpful.

“I love Stitch, the Talend Community, and the company,” said Tomasz. “Data has always been at the heart of our success, and Stitch is at the heart of our data.”