Customer Stories
From Strategy to Impact: Strengthening Data Foundations to Support Scalable Growth
Marie-Stella-Maris partners with Xebia to define a data strategy, reinforce its data foundations, improve reporting consistency, and enable greater internal ownership.
Regions:
Capabilities:
Partners:
Industries:
Regions:
Capabilities:
Partners:
Industries:
The Client
Marie-Stella-Maris is an Amsterdam-born premium lifestyle care brand offering luxury body care and home products defined by refined design and signature fragrances.
Marie-Stella-Maris (MSM) also has the mission to provide clean water for everyone. So, next time you wash your hands with MSM's soap (for example, at our Xebia office in Amsterdam), remember you're supporting projects to make drinking water accessible to communities around the world.
MSM is currently transitioning to a more data-driven culture, searching for operational insights to optimize its pipelines.
At a Glance
Challenge
As Marie-Stella-Maris continued scaling its operations, the company identified the need to further professionalize and standardize its data infrastructure and reporting environment.
Solution
Starting with a data strategy workshop, MSM partnered with Xebia to migrate its data warehouse, improve the logic behind the data models, and empower MSM employees to develop a culture of decision-making supported by strong data analytics.
Business Impact
MSM established a single source of truth for its data models and business metrics, introduced best practices in data modeling, and reduced the loading time of data by 80%.
The Challenge: Building a Stronger Foundation Together
As teams evolve, one challenge naturally follows: keeping knowledge continuous, accessible, and shared. At MSM, a period of change last year brought this into sharp focus, creating an opportunity to rethink how knowledge around data models and dashboards was organized and sustained.
As the organization continued to grow, existing analytics foundations were starting to show their limits to meet business needs. For example, subtle variations in dashboard logic highlighted the need for greater consistency, stronger ownership, and a more scalable approach to data.
In particular, data ingestion processes required further stabilization, and dbt models were primarily built as standalone SQL queries, leaving the option to take full advantage of dbt's broader data modeling capabilities. What began as a moment of transition quickly became a catalyst for modernization and strategy change—an opportunity to strengthen the data platform and better support the organization's future ambitions.
That's where Xebia came in.
We didn't start this project because we needed new technology. We started because we wanted a stronger foundation for decision-making as Marie-Stella-Maris continues to grow. Together with Xebia, we have improved our data platform, standardized our KPIs, and created a single source of truth that brings greater consistency across the business. Just as importantly, we've built a foundation that our own teams can confidently maintain and evolve as our ambitions continue to grow
Jan-Willem Boerhout
Chief Information Officer
The Solution: Starting with Strategy
Before diving into technical work, Xebia and Marie-Stella-Maris first defined the big picture. In February 2025, Xebia facilitated a data strategy and inspiration workshop with the MSM management team, bringing together leadership to explore the potential of data and analytics and define a shared vision for the organization.
The management team articulated three strategic objectives for data and AI:
- Fostering a data-driven culture that informs decisions and drives action.
- Optimizing the customer journey through deeper insights into customers, categories, and channels.
- Improving productivity by streamlining operational processes.
From this foundation, five concrete data and analytics use cases were identified across the organization. After prioritization, the management team agreed to focus on internal Business Intelligence dashboards for back-office performance insights as the immediate first step. This provided a pragmatic starting point that gave the engineering team clear direction and purpose.
Three Steps to Dashboard Success
When Xebia consultants joined MSM, they worked hand in hand with Marie Stella Maris's professionals to build a solid data foundation. When it came to the BI dashboards for back-office performance, these were the three main steps they took:
- Following the strategy, the priority was to ensure continuity and reliable access to insights for stakeholders. In particular, the teams brought greater clarity and structure to the existing BI dashboards, creating a more stable and accessible analytics layer for the business.
- Consultants migrated the data stack from Postgres to Databricks and rebuilt the full pipeline of data models on dbt. This laid the groundwork for a more flexible and scalable setup, opening the door to new possibilities and empowering teams to take greater ownership of their data and their dashboards.
- Building on this foundation, Xebia's analytics engineers introduced best practices in dbt, such as modular design, testing, and clear documentation, ensuring consistency and reliability across the data models. In parallel, MSM's analysts continued to develop dashboards in close collaboration with the business, creating a strong feedback loop and enabling insights that are both trusted and actionable.
The continuous back-and-forth communication between Xebia and MSM's professionals allowed for new insights to emerge. As challenges appeared, they redefined the initial plan and approaches, navigating change and creating long-term value.
It was a pleasure working with Keira and the Xebia team on this project. Strengthening our data foundations was an important step in preparing Marie-Stella-Maris's future. The impact can also immediately be seen across the business, with stakeholders gaining access to deeper insights on our operations and significantly reducing the time needed to turn data into action
Nicolas Jabot
Data Analyst at Marie-Stella-Maris
The Results: The Final Impact
Thanks to the combined efforts of MSM and Xebia, the data platform saw a significant step forward in both performance and usability. The daily data loading and transformation time was reduced from 40 minutes to just 5–8 minutes, enabling faster access to actionable commercial insights across the organization. Xebia's end-to-end support was key to make this happen.
At the same time, dashboards evolved into richer and more comprehensive tools, offering clear visibility into profitability and supporting better-informed decision-making. By standardizing KPI definitions across teams and dashboards, the organization established a shared language for performance, ensuring alignment and clarity throughout the business.
With best practices firmly in place, MSM also established a clear Single Source of Truth. This not only strengthened confidence in the data but also increased the scalability, auditability, and maintainability of the analytics platform. Perhaps most importantly, the transformation empowered internal teams to independently manage and evolve their data assets.
A modern data pipeline acts as the backbone of how an organization works with data. When business logic is built into well-structured and maintainable models, it creates a consistent foundation for reporting and analysis that can evolve as the business grows
Keira Ziyue Yang
Analytics Engineer at Xebia
Looking Ahead
These results directly reflect the strategic objectives defined at the outset of the engagement: fostering a data-driven culture, gaining deeper insights across customers and channels, and improving end-to-end operational efficiency; the goals that gave the technical work its purpose and direction from day one.
And what's next? Building from this great foundation to bring BI 2.0 to Marie-Stella-Maris.
Contact