UPDATED 08:57 EDT / MAY 16 2014

How Treasure Data helped one of Japan’s largest retailers unlock its consumer insights trove

MujiAlthough its name literally translates into “no-brand quality goods,” the Tokyo-listed Ryohin Keikaku, better known as Muji, is very serious about driving commercial awareness. Often referred to as the Ikea of Japan, the retailer has successfully carved out a niche for itself in the global market with a unique corporate philosophy that posits minimalism as a guiding principle across the entire product lifecycle, from manufacturing through packaging to the hallmark logoless design that unites the more than 7,000 items it carriers.

The combination of a fresh business approach and a sprawling catalog has brought Muji a long way from its humble 1980s roots as a low-cost brand of The Seiyu supermarket chain. Today, the company operates more than 450 outlets around the world and maintains an online store as well as a line of iOS apps, including a newly launched mobile loyalty service.

Until recently, Muri’s digital presence was no different than that of its traditional rivals and merely served to compliment its brick-and-mortar operations. But the firm has since managed to flip the situation on its head with the help of Treasure Data, an emerging cloud analytics firm designated as a “Cool Vendor in Big Data” by Gartner. The firm offers a managed service that runs on AWS and allows users to process vast amounts of information as needed without making a large upfront capital investment in infrastructure and talent.

“Taken individually, Treasure Data’s proprietary components are interesting and useful, but the real value proposition lies in the end-to-end service delivered from the cloud that founders Hiro Yoshikawa and Kaz Ohta have built,” Wikibon analyst Jeff Kelly wrote in a November professional alert . “Treasure Data’s approach removes significant adoption barriers associated with Big Data generally and Hadoop specifically by abstracting away the complexity of the underlying infrastructure and making it relatively easy to get data into the cloud for large-scale analysis.”

In a case study published last week, Treasure revealed that its service is actively helping Muri drive consumer engagement and boost sales. The retailer uses the firm’s platform to comb the data exhaust of its more than 4.7 million web and mobile users for insights into which specific digital assets manage to capture shoppers’ attention.  Useful subsets of that clickstream are then blended with other sources in the Amazon Redshift data warehouse services in order to map out the behavior of individual customers and tailor content based on their activity.

Treasure said that its service allowed Muji to roll out data-driven features in weeks rather than months and without purchasing  more hardware or hiring additional resources. The addition of analytical capabilities to the retailer’s mobile royalty app contributed to a rapid and noticeable increase in the number of overall store visits,  the firm added, connecting the dots between online browsing and offline buying.

photo credit: mrlemonfilm via photopin cc

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