Victoria Beckham Beauty’s products were winning over customers, but behind the scenes, their data systems were slowing the team down. The tangled foundation meant even simple questions required insider context, creating a critical bottleneck to scale what was working.
Despite having plenty of valuable data, the team struggled to access it easily. Every new question – from how customers discovered products to which shades sold best – relied on a small group of people with specialized tribal knowledge of the system’s data logic. The result was a growing backlog, slower decisions, and limited visibility into the insights that could drive product strategy and growth.
This often showed up as:
What should have been an asset was becoming a barrier to progress.
When Tess Alperin joined Victoria Beckham Beauty as Senior Director of Data Insights & Analytics, she stepped into a familiar challenge: a fast-growing brand with a data foundation that hadn’t kept pace. As a data team of one, she knew things needed to change... and quickly.
Tess had led data teams at Rent the Runway and Birchbox, so she knew that getting Victoria Beckham Beauty on the right track wasn’t a matter of hiring a single data engineer or analyst. They needed both. The work spanned data engineering, analytics engineering, and true analytical problem-solving. It was too broad for one role and too urgent to solve slowly.
“We had work that was more data engineering, hybrid analytics engineering, true analyst work… hiring one person wouldn’t have made sense. Having that wider set of skill sets was really important.”
What she needed was a strategic partner who could move fast, flex with the business, and feel like an extension of her team. That’s what led her to Data Culture.
The blended nature of the Data Culture team gave Victoria Beckham Beauty exactly what those early months required: the ability to scale engineering resources heavily during foundational rebuilds, and later shift toward deeper analytics strategy as the systems matured. It meant Tess didn’t have to choose between speed and quality, or between engineering and analysis.
And importantly, it meant she wasn’t navigating it alone.
With a clear mandate and a broad scope of work ahead, the team needed more than hands on keyboards, she needed a team that could untangle the legacy foundation, rebuild it correctly, and enable the business to finally use data with confidence. Data Culture stepped in to provide exactly that blend of engineering depth, analytics expertise, and strategic support.
Data Culture worked alongside Tess to deliver:
Together, this gave Victoria Beckham Beauty the firepower to replace a messy, fragile setup with a scalable, trustworthy data foundation: one that finally matched the team’s eagerness to leverage data in a meaningful, day-to-day way.
Once the new platform was introduced, things changed. Instead of spending hours of manual labor for pulling revenue by product category, these new efficiencies allowed everyone to focus on more meaningful questions.
As Tess shared, “It’s now no longer what was the revenue yesterday? Everyone knows that. It’s now, what is the journey of a customer? What is their first purchase, second, third? What are the drivers?”
This made their marketing efforts more customized and more efficient. Less guessing, more knowing.
The turning point came when the team uncovered something that had been very challenging to access before: basket analysis. They could now see what products customers were actually buying together. This new insight drove the team's approach to post-purchase flows.
That insight became the catalyst for broader strategic changes. With clean data, VBB could:
One insight unlocked an entire layer of strategy, from who to target, to what to recommend, to how to increase repeat purchases. And it finally gave the team confidence in the “why” behind their customers’ behavior.
