Tape à l’oeil

Responding to changing customer needs, today and in the future

Tape à l’oeil company logo

In retail, you have to combine promptness with proximity. Information must be able to flow from product design to sales; otherwise we can’t do our job. Talend is a strategic resource to make that happen.

Guillaume Porquier

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Build the data infrastructure to respond to customer needs in real time

Near real-time response

for register receipt stats that used to take a full day

100 new data streams

developed in just 6 months

Optimum data quality

for supply chain and customer analytics


Children’s clothing and accessories retailer Tape à l'œil has a base of 250 stores in France, 25 in Belgium, and 11 in Poland, and a partnership network that operates in the Middle East, North Africa, and overseas. Even so, its online business currently accounts for some 20% of the company's operations.

“We very quickly proposed these combination web-to-store routes,” explains Guillaume Porquier, Information Systems Director at Tape à l'œil. “That was a winner. And the COVID-19 crisis further accelerated this transformation. A portion of our customers became omnichannel customers and took a liking to this service, even though 80% of the orders placed online are picked up in stores today.”

Rather than work with an aging ERP system, Tape à l'œil decided to implement a new SAP- and Snowflake-based infrastructure for a cloud data warehouse. “Talend, together with Stitch, had everything we needed to orchestrate the entirety of our data interchange. In addition, we decided to make our data self-service, which makes analysts and data engineers independent and improves their response times.

“Today, data is at the heart of everything we do,” says Porquier. “If a product is not available at time T, the sale is lost. You run the risk both that the customer will turn to another retailer, and that the product will have to be sold at a discount at the end of the season. With COVID-19, some suppliers have had to suspend operations, and the real-time management of our supply chain allowed us to make the appropriate course changes very quickly.”

Internal and external data provide the stores with insight into customer behaviors and buying habits. This information can then be incorporated into predictive models. With the data collected online with Stitch, the company can also enhance its customer marketing data with customer journey analysis and predictive analytics.

“Our information system was built to meet all these challenges, the principal one being to put data at the heart of our strategy,” concludes Porquier.