A luxury retailer wanted the dashboards that run the business to feel as considered as the brand itself. We built them a designed Power BI environment on a modern data platform, and it is now the first thing their leadership team opens each morning.
The challenge
Our client is a UK luxury goods retailer with stores around the world, a strong online presence and wholesale partners. Their brand is built on craftsmanship and detail, from the product to the packaging to the in-store experience.
Their reporting did not match. Data sat across many systems, and the dashboards built over the years worked but felt generic. For a business that cares this much about design, opening something every morning that does not feel like the business is a small but constant friction.
There was a practical need too. Leadership wanted one trusted view across every channel, from standalone stores and concessions to wholesale, franchise and online, rather than separate views that did not always agree.
Our approach
We treated the reporting as a designed product, not a set of dashboards. Layout, navigation and interaction were all deliberate choices, and we went beyond standard Power BI where it made a visible difference:
- A branded front door. Instead of a list of reports, users land on a designed page that groups every report by area, so getting to the right one takes a single click.
- A daily sales view built for reading at a glance. The most-used report shows every channel across day, week, month and year, against last year and target, laid out cleanly rather than as a crowded table.
- Depth behind the polish. A single executive view covers every channel. A customer lifecycle report shows how customers move between new, repeat, at-risk and lapsed. A returns report separates what could have been prevented from what could not.
Underneath sits a Microsoft Fabric platform that brings together the retailer's finance, ecommerce, in-store footfall and marketing sources. It refreshes automatically every morning, and one Power BI semantic model gives every report the same definitions.
The detail of how it was designed and built is in our article, When BI has to feel like the brand.
The result
The leadership team now opens the same reports every morning, and the daily sales summary reaches their inboxes shortly after the overnight refresh.
Because the definitions live in one place, a change made once appears everywhere. The numbers no longer drift between dashboards or between teams, and the conversation has moved from whether the figures can be trusted to what to do about them.
The business can also see where its value is being created or lost: how customers move through their lifecycle, and why products come back. For a luxury brand, where returns matter to both margin and customer experience, that visibility is a real advantage.
