
CUSTOMER STORIES
Hot Topic Rocks On with Optimized Customer Experience and Revenue Opportunities
The pop culture retailer rages against the data silo machine to deepen customer understanding and personalize shopping experiences with Snowflake.
KEY RESULTS:
$200k
Saved in one weekend by optimizing fulfillment with Snowflake and Robling
1k+
Employees now empowered by data and 10x faster queries


Industry
RetailLocation
City of Industry, CADelivering the one-stop shop for alt-youth culture — from in-store to online
Hot Topic splashed onto the scene in 1989 as a sanctuary for the alternative youth of America. Vibrating with loud music and eye-catching displays, the retailer continues to captivate shoppers with edgy storefronts and an eclectic line of products that appeal to every trend and niche — from band tees for rock, metal and punk anti-establishment icons to body jewelry, vibrant hair dyes, anime collectibles and Justice League merch. Over the last 35 years, Hot Topic has exploded from one non-conforming garage in Southern California into more than 700 stores nationwide, with two subdivisions — Box Lunch and Her Universe — and a thriving ecommerce business.
To succeed, Hot Topic has to keep up with ever-shifting pop culture trends. Factor in its demographic — young digital natives who expect near-instant gratification, — and some of the most pressing challenges of retail are only exacerbated. The company’s response: Ensure consistency across in-store and ecommerce shopping experiences for every Hot Topic customer by using Snowflake to harness surging customer data.
“We've built a very synergistic relationship between the website and the stores, which we couldn't do without Snowflake.”
Albert Kao
To deliver a seamless, personalized omnichannel shopping experience, Hot Topic chose the AI Data Cloud to eliminate data silos and unify customer data. Shifting Hot Topic’s data environment to Snowflake has transformed the retailer in many ways, from making data insights accessible to more than 1,000 users to uncovering unprofitable fulfillments that drive strategic decision-making.
Story Highlights
- Better understand each customer: With more real-time data, Hot Topic improved its customer 360 to anticipate buying trends and better stock its stores.
- Improve organization-wide data accessibility: Hot Topic shifted from three-day SLAs for SKU-level reporting to self-service, giving more than 1,000 decision-makers comprehensive visibility into omnichannel analytics.
- Create online and in-store synergy: Improved analytics revealed that online and in-store experiences sometimes competed with each other. Data-driven changes forged a more unified experience and shared sales credit between stores and online orders.
Rebelling against data silos for faster, unified insights
Prior to implementing Snowflake, Hot Topic’s siloed data made it nearly impossible to get a unified view of its business and customers. Customer data resided in Epsilon, which only two people could access, while the rest of the data was spread across Oracle Retail Analytics and manually generated Excel spreadsheets. “There were times where we’d run a report, go out to lunch and hope the queries would be done by the time we got back,” says Albert Kao, Hot Topic’s Vice President of CX and Analytics.
Hot Topic’s move to Snowflake allowed the business to create a single source of truth that incorporates both product and customer data. “Previously, we operated from a product-centric view. We would analyze sales data and make buying decisions accordingly,” Kao says. “But sales data is just the half of it. The customer data housed in Snowflake is the other 180 degrees. We now have a 360-degree view of what’s going on.”
With its customer 360 firmly in place, Hot Topic can anticipate customer needs, stock stores accordingly and better stitch together its in-store and digital experiences to drive sales. “Snowflake has helped enable our store and ecommerce experiences to work together to drive business to each other,” Kao says. “Every ecommerce sale gives credit to a store location, while our website provides the option to ‘buy online, pick up in store.’ This helps us build loyalty with our customers while providing them with a better overall experience.”
The move from legacy infrastructures to Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud and Robling’s retail analytics platform also substantially accelerated insights. The time it took to analyze sales and inventory data went from minutes to seconds, while the duration of larger queries dropped from days or hours to minutes.
“The big game changer is having everything in one central location,” Kao says. “Now, we write a single query to review a campaign's success. It’s giving a layer of truth to something that we used to guess at.”
Fueling data-driven leadership and decision-making through richer analytics
Today, the company’s decisions are powered by everything from purchase history to predictive analytics on shopping behavior. With Snowflake's ability to ingest massive data sets and provide interactive, conversational analytics, Hot Topic’s executives have a more nuanced understanding of the business and the many factors that influence success.

“Hot Topic leadership now uses Snowflake to understand the business in a deeper way. We’ve yet to encounter a question that we’ve not been able to answer through data in Snowflake.”
Albert Kao
These rich insights have transformed leadership meetings across the business. Hot Topic executives can easily access engagement data and granular buying trends in weekly stand-ups to gain a full picture of sales. “Executives now know how many customers to expect, how many new customers a specific collection brought in, how many dollars each customer spent and how many times they walked into our store,” Kao says. These comprehensive metrics help Hot Topic anticipate customer preferences and decide which areas of the business they should invest in more.
Hot Topic’s leadership team can also drill down into specific campaigns, like their biannual physical mailers, much more quickly. “Analyzing the performance of our mailer, which is a major campaign for us, used to be a weeklong project.” Kao says. “With everything unified, we run a single query and get those insights in a day.”
Pivoting around profitability pitfalls
Like most retailers, Hot Topic was massively disrupted by COVID-19. Bands inspiring their quintessential tees stopped touring, people weren’t able to shop in person, and as the world stood still, so did shipments. With global supply chains in disarray, Hot Topic focused on in-store inventory and adapted to offer ship-from-store and store pick-up options.
A revised digital order platform helped orders soar, turning bloated pandemic inventory into record sales. But fulfillment costs were rising just as fast. Hot Topic customers don't just buy a single Nirvana T-shirt — they coordinate a whole grunge wardrobe, so the company has more items per order than the industry average. Despite its creativity and agility in the face of COVID-19, Hot Topic wasn’t reaping the rewards.
To solve the problem, Hot Topic turned to Robling. With one central data repository powered by Snowflake, Robling’s retail analytics solution found that the allocation algorithm behind the new order management system didn’t consider gross margins. More specifically, split shipments — when a single order of multiple items is sent to a customer in separate shipments — were unprofitable. In response, Hot Topic limited the number of stores involved in fulfilling a single order and saved more than $200,000 — in the first weekend alone.
The hottest topic: AI
Hot Topic will be using AI to make shopping online as easy as possible through improved searchability. AI analyzes its product images and descriptions, then the algorithm generates all the terms a person might type in to get to that specific product. “For a Superman T-shirt, AI might add tags like ‘superhero,’ ‘red,’ ‘blue,’ ‘Justice League’ and so on, so people get to what they want even faster,” Kao says. Those AI-generated tags also amplify products' search engine performance, and Kao expects the tech to improve marketing personalization next.
Robling is investigating ways to further improve Hot Topic’s margins after solving previous fulfillment issues. In its latest project, Robling’s professional services team is exploring Snowflake Cortex AI for anomaly detection and performing regression analysis to determine the root cause. This should help Hot Topic proactively identify and address any issues impacting its business.
As for what’s next, Hot Topic’s team has their eyes set on Snowflake Copilot — an AI-powered assistant that helps nontechnical users analyze data by developing SQL queries based on their natural language prompt.

“Snowflake let us open up our minds and go after data-driven optimizations that we couldn’t even fathom before.”
Albert Kao
Start your 30-DayFree Trial
Try Snowflake free for 30 days and experience the AI Data Cloud that helps eliminate the complexity, cost and constraints inherent with other solutions.