Fashion retailer, Rebelle halves lead time and doubles output with Tableau


Rebelle uses Tableau across all departments, from accounting to marketing. Teams pull data into Tableau Desktop from Google Analytics and an Amazon Redshift data warehouse. And with Tableau Cloud, teams can share insights across the company. With faster access to data, Rebelle has optimized production, cutting lead times in half. The company also allocates resources better, which doubled total output. Country managers now have live, country-specific dashboards to track metrics. And this is just the beginning. As Rebelle expands through Europe, Stefan Schliek, Head of Controlling & BI, is confident that Tableau will scale with the growing business and its growing data.


Tableau: Tell us about Rebelle. Stefan Schliek, Head of Controlling and BI: Rebelle is an online marketplace for second-hand designer women’s fashion. People can buy and sell women’s fashion through us. We provide the platform and handle the entire process. Tableau: Can you share how Rebelle uses Tableau? What data sources do you connect to? Stefan Schliek: We use Tableau Desktop to generate and build reports, which we then deploy using Tableau Cloud. We use Tableau on a daily basis in all departments, from accounting to marketing. In those departments we mainly use our own Amazon Redshift data warehouse as data source and blend with data from Google Analytics.

We’ve cut lead times almost in half and more than doubled our output.

Tableau: How satisfied are your users? Stefan Schliek: Our users are generally very satisfied. They can use the tools with complete autonomy, allowing them to ask new questions and receive answers very quickly. We also receive feedback on how they use it. Often they just want to surpass their own achievement from yesterday. Tableau: What benefit has the solution brought to your organization? Stefan Schliek: We’ve seen significant improvements throughout the department. And the time we save, we can throw at other projects and progress faster as a company. For instance, we’ve optimized lead times in production, almost cutting them in half. At the same time, we’ve almost doubled our total output due to improved employee and resource allocation. Tableau: What was your BI solution before Tableau? Stefan Schliek: Originally, we did our reporting in Excel, just like many others did and probably still do. But we simply reached the limits of Excel with regards to speed and data volume. And that is where Tableau really shines. We evaluated practically all the products leading in the Gartner report. With Tableau, I feel like I will be able to do things in the future that I can’t even fathom today. At the same time we were very confident in the future development of Tableau, and it’s just a fact that you need a reliable partner who can keep up with the pace of technological progress. Tableau: What is the outlook for the future? Stefan Schliek: We are expanding throughout Europe and hiring country managers. These country managers are now also provided with live data they can access, work with, and base their decisions on - completely independent from our Hamburg headquarters. That is just one of our next steps. I am curious myself to see what else is coming. But whatever it is, I am confident we can do it with Tableau.

Tableau doesn’t just give you a good feeling. There is also a system around it that allows you to really scale.

Tableau: From your perspective, are there any other key aspects for which you'd recommend Tableau? Stefan Schliek: We realized that most questions could be answered by the Tableau Community. And for those that couldn’t, well, we are lucky enough to have The Information Lab literally just around the corner. And we were also very happy with the Tableau helpdesk itself. So, we’re not just feeling good about Tableau, but also about the entire landscape around it. There really is a system in place that allows you to scale up. And I’ve never seen a better product documentation either. All in all I am delighted. We were also very happy that Tableau now has a data center in Dublin. Having servers in Europe instead of the United States is an important criterion with regards to data security.