Spectacular growth: Beaumotica accelerates expansion with data-driven insights from Talend

  Beaumotica combines smart lighting, design, and top brands to create the perfect mood and atmosphere for any room. And with help from Talend, the company can now combine data, analytics, and automation to optimize business decisions and accelerate growth. Last year alone the company tripled its business and expanded into new territories across Europe.

Based in The Netherlands, Beaumotica has been growing steadily since 2007. “We launched the company to make it easier for people to use smart lighting solutions,” said Henry van der Borg, co-founder and managing director of Beaumotica. “We wanted to help them see the possibilities, select the right products, and control their lighting easily from touchscreens or apps — without costing a fortune.”

The company found that there was a mass market for its products and services, and in recent years Beaumotica has accelerated its expansion on several fronts:

• Geographically: Building on its success in The Netherlands, Beaumotica is entering new markets in Europe. The company’s ecommerce platform now translates into multiple languages to facilitate cross-border commerce.
• Demographically: The initial customer base for Beaumotica was primarily residential consumers, but today 30% of Beaumotica’s business is commercial — office environments of all types and sizes — and Beaumotica is pursuing plans to further increase its commercial customer base.
• Product range: Having established a great reputation for mood lighting and design, Beaumotica is now expanding into other smart home and office solutions including heating, security, and home accessories.

How data shines a spotlight on opportunity

One of the keys to success for Beaumotica’s multi-year growth plan has been an intensive focus on data, according to Mr. van der Borg.

“We’re still a small company, but we have to compete with very big companies,” he said. “That means we need to consistently maximize the performance. And that means we need to base our decisions not on guesswork but data. If we make a mistake that costs us just 1% per year, that can put us in the red.”

Mr. van der Borg recognized early on that connecting multiple data sources was the critical first step. “We needed to excel at data integration — otherwise we would be limited in our insights and stuck in terms of growth and innovation.”

The next step was to find the right data integration solution. “We needed an online solution that had a low cost of ownership, that wasn’t difficult to use,” said van der Borg. “We found solutions that could address one aspect or another, but the piecemeal approach was going to be far too expensive and time-consuming, having to integrate all those point-to-point software solutions. Then we found Talend.”

“…We need to base our decisions not on guesswork but data. If we make a mistake that costs us just 1% per year, that can put us in the red.”
— Henry van der Borg

Talend provided a single online platform that could integrate data from virtually any source. “With Talend we could connect our web information with the accounting system, physical inventory information, customer data, and so on — so we could start to get a full view of our business intelligence,” said van der Borg.

“We could get a complete view of our stock,” he continued. “We could see our customer satisfaction levels and trends. Which products are selling with which other products. How much we can spend on marketing based on profit margin per product. And so on. Suddenly our data allowed us to see what was working, what was not, and what was possible.”

Turning new ideas into new business

Initially, Mr. van der Borg himself was the primary Talend user at Beaumotica. “I downloaded the Community Edition and started using it; there was no big learning curve,” he said. “When I had questions, I could go to the Talend Community for help, and through the Community I met people who not only answered my questions but connected me with professionals who could take us to a higher level.”

“Suddenly our data allowed us to see what was working, what was not, and what was possible.”
— Henry van der Borg

One of the professionals he met this way was Taco van het Reve, Managing Director at CIMT in The Netherlands. “CIMT gave us access to very smart people like Taco and his team of specialists, who helped us get even more out of Talend and allowed me to focus on the business,” said van der Borg. “CIMT created and implemented a centralized data hub architecture that we could use for more sophisticated modeling.”

 “What we did was combine the data integration capabilities of Talend, the modeling flexibility of Data Vault, and the scalability of Snowflake,” said Mr. van het Reve. “Agility may be a bit of a buzzword today, but Beaumotica wanted a very specific kind of agility — a data architecture that could handle new ideas and new ways of working turn them into business growth.”

Beyond the newfound levels of agility, Beaumotica found that the new architecture also delivered a whole new level of scalability.

“It doesn’t matter if we grow tenfold — things will still keep working,” said van der Borg. “As we expand internationally, we can add data from warehouses in other countries; we can automate the uploading of our catalog and do the translations, whether it’s thousand or tens of thousands of products; we can easily import the pricing system and update the pricing of our competitors; we can forecast demand by product, group of products, or territory — it just scales easily to integrate the right solution for everything.”

While the triple-digit growth of Beaumotica over the past year was clearly fueled by many factors, Mr. van der Borg credits Talend with being central to the company’s success.

“With Talend we can be a top performer even with a very small team,” he said. “And with the superb support we’ve received from CIMT, the Talend Community, and Talend’s service and support professionals, we can execute on our growth strategy. We can look back and fix mistakes, and we can move forward, full speed ahead.”