In 1996, Charming Shoppes came to Teradata for solutions to support merchandising in its chain of Fashion Bug women’s plus-size apparel stores. They began as many larger Teradata customers had by consolidating data into a single repository. One short year later, the company’s Enterprise Data Warehouse from Teradata was credited as supporting a financial turnaround from red ink to a net income of $19.3 million.
As Charming Shoppes grew to add several Lane Bryant franchises, Catherine’s Plus Sizes, and major catalogs to its mix, its investment in Teradata technology grew as well – including new BI tools that enable thousands of queries daily, as well as tracking inventory, sales movement, and advanced reporting capabilities. With over 60 million customers, Charming Shoppes has now moved its batch data processing from the mainframe to the EDW with great success, and is evolving toward Active Data Warehousing.