Database Reference
In-Depth Information
where they scan them every time they are moved. A year ago, just from adding
barcodes to the dresses, we were able to cut down the time a dress spends in
the warehouse to less than a day.
Second, there's the warehouse-to-consumer-and-back piece. We have UPS
data that ties a dress to a package. This allows us to know where it is on its
outbound and inbound journeys. We use this data to optimize the flow of
dresses. This is really different than anything I had dealt with before, because
these dresses are physical things that can deactivate and go missing. Suddenly,
missing data represents a much more intriguing problem. In this part of the
business we've been working on predictive modeling to figure out whether or
not a dress will come back in time to be sent out for the next rental.
Third, there's the customer support piece. We focus on surfacing the right
data to customer support so they can be more successful and have an easier
time doing their jobs. When a client calls us stressed out about an issue with a
dress, we want to make sure the right data is available to customer support so
that they can solve the customer's problems—whether it's related to where
a dress is, why a returned dress isn't in the system, or any other type of issue.
We want to minimize the stress of the customer and customer support.
Fourth, there's the web-site operations piece. This is the area I'm mainly
involved in. The web-site operations group focuses on questions like: How do
people find the dress that they want? What kind of features do they want?
How can we make these features even better? It's been great being the first
woman on the analytics team, as I have some inside knowledge of how I would
go about finding a dress and what the effort entails. This helps us with the
data that we have gathered and continue to gather from outside sources and
our community.
For the fifth silo, there's the customary data engineering that comes with
pretty much all companies: marketing, accounting, logging, website optimiza-
tion, and all those kinds of things. Data in this silo is very important and fun
as well. It's just that these are outside of the scope of what I think is different
about the data at Rent the Runway.
Gutierrez:
How do you deal with the physical aspects of body
measurements?
Smith:
Body measurements and fit are very hard problems. There are many
ways of trying to deal with it. It's useful to think about it in terms of the
data. The easiest data to work with are the body measurements people give
to us—their height, their weight, their bust size, their body shape. And then
when they come on the website, they review a dress and tell us if and how
the dress fits.
