Founded in 2012, Three Squirrels has grown into China’s best-known digital-native snack brand, marketing roasted nuts and convenience foods online and through an expanding franchise chain. After logging RMB 766 million in first-day Singles’ Day sales, the company shifted from pure e-commerce to an omni-channel model now spanning more than 1 000 brick-and-mortar “small-shop” outlets, nationwide logistics hubs and influencer-led livestream studios. Its youthful image, supply-chain agility and experimentation have made Three Squirrels a flagship for data-driven innovation in China’s fiercely competitive fast-moving consumer-goods sector.
“Digital transformation means different things to different companies, but for Three Squirrels it is very down-to-earth: our managers no longer chase spreadsheets or spend hours analysing data before deciding. What used to take at least four hours now takes at most thirty minutes—we can view multi-store performance at a glance, even from a phone.”
—— Data Product Designer from Three Squirrels
Rapid omni-channel expansion left Three Squirrels drowning in fragmented data. Order, warehouse, logistics and POS systems generated tens of thousands of records, yet analysts still exported disparate spreadsheets, stitched them manually and waited hours for a report. Headquarters lacked real-time visibility into store performance, regional managers operated blind, and marketing teams could not tell which products, audiences or moments delivered return. Data latency and inaccuracy throttled growth, inflated acquisition costs and jeopardised speed-to-market ambitions.
With Lingyang’s help, Three Squirrels first built a unified data foundation in Dataphin, streaming order, warehouse, logistics and POS feeds from 1 000 stores into Alibaba Cloud MaxCompute. AI-powered quality checks and one-click modeling cleansed billions of rows overnight, while a semantic layer standardised dimensions like SKU, region and channel. Quick BI now auto-generates eight KPI snapshots per store each morning, serving interactive dashboards and natural-language search on desktop and mobile.
Marketing rolled out Quick Audience, whose machine-learning look-alike models surface high-value micro-segments, predict buying intent and launch cross-channel ads in one click. By activating transaction, media and CRM data, the engine builds propensity scores, recommends creative and syncs audiences to Alibaba’s DSP for closed-loop optimisation. A four-week agile deployment, led jointly by Squirrels analysts and Lingyang architects, delivered phased releases and rapid iteration.
Within a month, reporting time dropped from four hours to thirty minutes, freeing analysts for higher-value work and giving executives palm-top visibility into every store’s sales and traffic. Unified metrics ended reconciliation disputes and enabled data-driven coaching that lifted in-store conversion by double digits. Quick Audience’s precision targeting raised new-customer ROI by 40 percent during Singles’ Day, while reducing media wastage. Employees run over 8 000 queries weekly, and the stack has become the springboard for future product innovation. Dashboard adoption is soaring, with managers checking KPIs during store visits and supplier meetings.
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