Balsam Brands Selects SoundCommerce for AI, Analytics, Data Activation

SoundCommerce today announced it has been selected by Balsam Brands, a global eCommerce retailer with roots in holiday and home décor, and the leading provider of realistic artificial Christmas trees – a $9.5 billion market worldwide.

The SoundCommerce partnership will enable Balsam Brands to deploy detailed retail-ready data sets for improved insights to action in the areas of shopper experience and business performance across its flagship direct-to-consumer commerce business, www.balsamhill.com, as well as operations with key retailers such as Nordstrom, as the company continues to grow.

While data is the bedrock for retailers embracing artificial intelligence (AI), 42 percent of retailers readily admit they are struggling to connect their various data silos. With SoundCommerce, Balsam Brands will now be ready to take advantage of the transformative powers of AI.

SoundCommerce will unify and catalog Balsam Brands’ data for AI modeling, cross-functional business analytics, and customer activation, reducing the time and complexity of integrating and hosting business data for generative AI large language models (LLMs), such as Snowflake Cortex and Google Gemini on Vertex AI.

View the infographic at: https://soundcommerce.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Balsam-SoundCommerce.pdf

Balsam Brands will gain business-ready, direct-to-consumer ecommerce data models rendered and populated with validated data directly in Balsam Brands’ Snowflake tenancy. Ready-to-go data models are available in Snowflake for immediate analysis, allowing the Balsam Brands team to avoid time-consuming, resource-intensive data transformation tasks, for faster time-to-value on the data.

“At Balsam Brands, we know the importance of using trustworthy data to drive world-class experiences for customers and better company performance. With SoundCommerce and Snowflake, we’re building future-proof data infrastructure for machine learning, advanced analytics and data activation,” said Balsam Brands’ Chief Technology Officer France Roy. “The goal is to make the data and the tools easy and effective for every business stakeholder across our company.”

“Balsam Brands sees data capability as a key driver of business performance and competitive advantage,” said Eric Best, SoundCommerce Founder and CEO. “With SoundCommerce and Snowflake, Balsam Brands can tap new insights and act on data in new and more automated ways, and a culture of data visibility, transparency, and trust. We look forward to accelerating Balsam Brands’ adoption and use of Snowflake at the center of the modern data stack.”

Balsam Brands newly minted modern data stack combines the strengths of SoundCommerce and Snowflake to accelerate time-to-value for data Discovery and insights to action for a wide range of stakeholders:

• For executives and operations pros: High fidelity order data – including order lifecycle and profitability – unified across owned commerce (SAP Hybris), marketplace (Amazon) and ERP (Sterling Commerce) systems.
• For marketers: Unified digital marketing data combining shopping cart conversions, digital marketing attribution, paid media spend and activity – collected and unified from system-of-record APIs rather than browser cookies and site tracking tags.
• For ecommerce pros: Consolidated shopper engagement data from website, shopping cart, email and SMS, materialized in Snowflake for marketing activation and campaign automation.
• For data analysts: Open data models rendered in Snowflake for easy access by generative AI large language models (LLMs), BI and analytics tools, rETL tools such as HighTouch and Census, and downstream applications across the enterprise.

The SoundCommerce platform connects both on-premise and SaaS applications such as SAP Hybris, IBM Sterling Commerce, Amazon Marketplace, Google Analytics, ContentServ and Klaviyo with modern cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake to enable faster and better business decision making across commerce functions and departments. SoundCommerce is available as a fully integrated and turnkey data onboarding solution for Snowflake.

SoundCommerce maintains state-of-the-art data privacy protections, and any personally-identifiable information is anonymized and used by SoundCommerce and Snowflake only for the benefit of Balsam Brands and not any of their other customers.