Passione Unghie Develops Dynamic Data Driven Approach to Support Business Growth with DUNED on AWS

Passione Unghie is supporting its growth using Amazon QuickSight to handle its large volumes of data. Working with AWS Select Consulting Partner DUNED, the company now has much richer insights by using dashboard reporting for key departments from marketing to product development and finance. Following its move to AWS, the company has been able to enhance customer understanding, react faster to changing market trends, as well as improve sales forecasting and stock control.

Passione Unghie, based in Italy, is a fast-growing ecommerce company providing a wealth of nail products from nail polishes, nail care, and nail decorations for both consumers and nail professionals. All of its products are sold online, offering a guaranteed delivery within a 24–48-hour window for all customers in Italy.

To support its growth, Passione Unghie needed richer insights from its large volume of data, generated by around 1,000,000 website sessions each month, as well as past orders and active user activity. Using this data, the company can improve customer understanding, target new customers, and maximize its advertising spend. The company also wanted to enhance decision making for departments, including product development, finance, ecommerce management, and purchasing for areas such as forecasting, stock control, and sales.

With a large number of data sources, including its Magento ecommerce engine, Shopify, Google Analytics, SAP Marketing Cloud, as well as social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, the company had a huge task ahead.  

“Our business generates a lot of data, though it was taking far too long to gain the business understanding we needed fast enough,” says Antonio Donà, general manager, Passione Unghie. “We were extracting data from every single database with no cohesive view of it, with decision making taking far too long.”

Given its data demands, the company realized that it needed a more flexible and cost-effective solution to its on-premises IT architecture and decided to move to a cloud-based set up built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). To support this move, it chose AWS Select Consulting Partner, DUNED, to assist with the transition.

DUNED began the digital transformation process by mapping out the related business data requirements of each department and their data sources. To handle the large amount of unstructured and semi-structured data, much of which was held in CSV files, a data lake was created running on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

DUNED also deployed the serverless Amazon Aurora as its main database to allow it to easily increase capacity as its data demands grew and as workloads demanded. “It was essential that our infrastructure be designed so that the various branches of our data lake could easily interface with our applications,” says Donà. DUNED really supported us through that and ensured the whole project could be delivered in just 3 months.”

With DUNED’s help, Passione Unghie also began looking at an enhanced business intelligence (BI) reporting system and chose Amazon QuickSight thanks to its ability to collate data from multiple sources and provide easy-to-understand dashboard reporting.

Following a successful rollout of its AWS cloud platform, Passione Unghie is continuing on its optimization journey with DUNED’s help. As well as adding microservices, the company also wants to integrate its Navision ERP system and incorporate the Amazon Personalize product recommendation tool. To improve business query response times, it plans to benefit from the natural language processing capabilities of Amazon QuickSight Q too.

“As a 100% online company, we needed to be able to introduce a much more data-driven approach to how we work,” says Donà. “With the help of DUNED and AWS, we have a platform that really supports us on multiple levels. Our team has better information access and we feel more on top of everything—it’s really transformed the way we work across the entire business.”