Whether you’re passionate about Prada, devoted to Vuitton or head over heels with Louboutin, Shedd will change your life. This new fashion app is taking the world by storm. It’s currently active in UAE and Bulgaria, and preparing to expand to new markets exponentially. In order to facilitate this growth and build their own big data infrastructure, they are opening a new office in Barcelona and hiring a Head of Business Intelligence.
War on wardrobe waste
The Shedd story starts in the summer of 2015 at Dubizzle, the leading classifieds website in the Middle East and North Africa. Dubizzle-employees Tariq Zabian and Alex Hutley were both based in Dubai, the capital of #neverworn. They noticed that the fashion industry in the region was booming. According to a survey, 43 percent of women in the region owned at least five items that never made it out of the wardrobe, with the tags still intact. Although many new local and international brands were reveling in success, Zabian and Hutley also noticed there was nothing major going on in the second-hand sector.
“We are trying to help the world make better use of its possessions. We see the biggest opportunity right now in the fashion segment, where globalization, increased dispensable income in emerging markets, social media obsession, and fast fashion are creating consumerism that is spiraling out of control.” – Tariq Zabian, Co-founder of Shedd
So when they came up with the idea for a mobile-only fashion marketplace, they buckled down and quickly put together a business plan. Shedd was incubated within Dubizzle and soon became an autonomous spin-off, with Zabian and Hutley as co-founders, backed by investor Naspers. The app is currently available in UAE and Bulgaria, and will soon expand to five further markets.
The Shedd motto is “Buy it / Wear it / Shedd it”, and it really is as simple as that. All you have to do to sell an item is take a photo, upload it, write a blurb and add some hashtags. All listing are reviewed by a team of specialists before they’re added. That’s all there’s to it. Shopping is just as easy. You can use location services to browse everything that’s close by, click on hashtags or you can use the search function to look for specific items or your favorite brands.
“We’re a young and hungry company with a global footprint, benefiting from the backing and experience of global powerhouse Naspers, to scale quickly. We are aggressively expanding into new markets, and are still agile enough to test and iterate design systems with pace (as a start-up would).” – Alex Hutley, Co-founder of Shedd
About the vacancy
Shedd is continuously growing within UAE and Bulgaria and getting ready to expand to five new markets shortly. If they keep expanding at this pace, their data infrastructure will be bursting at the seams soon. Shedd is a start-up, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be caught with their pants down. Thanks to the guidance and backing of Naspers, they are opening a new office in Barcelona and expanding their Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities. One of the new hires in Barcelona will be a Business Intelligence Manager. This professional will design, develop and maintain Shedd’s business intelligence architecture, technology stack and its underlying processes so that everyone at Shedd can work with and extract insights.
The design, development and implementation of a robust data infrastructure are key. Another priority is to drive data-centricity throughout every business unit. Therefore, the Business Intelligence Manager will create a self-service data mart and promote the use of it among colleagues. A major part of this role will be holding continuous conversations with business users and source system owners to drive business and data rules to for data quality assessments.
Of course, there are many existing data models already including logical and physical models of the data warehouse and source systems. The Business Intelligence Manager will develop, manage and validate all these models. They will also design and develop a performance marketing data model that will serve as the key decision-making tools for marketeers. As the scale of the application will keep growing, the Business Intelligence Manager will eventually be tasked with building a team. This moment may come sooner rather than later, so a proven ability to lead and grow teams is an advantage.
“There’s funding from Naspers, there’s expertise from OLX and Dubizzle, and there’s a huge opportunity at Shedd. BI Experts who are ready to roll up their sleeves will have the opportunity to build a state-of-the-art data infrastructure.” – Benjamin Cohen, Growth Manager at Shedd
Candidate profile
Candidates will have a degree in Computer Science (or comparable) as well as at least three years of relevant work experience. In this case, relevant means: design & development of an enterprise data warehouse or business intelligence systems; data analysis & modeling in a petabyte scale data warehouse; data architecture, warehousing, master data management, enterprise information integration & ETL. They will need to have Python, R, Matlab or similar tools under their belt, as well as SQL. Ideally, they’ll also be familiar with MongoDB, Hadoop, Mixpanel, Google Analytics and Adjust. But what’s most important, is the eagerness to keep learning new things. To do well in a fast-changing, high-growth environment such as Shedd, professionals need to apply the 80/20 rule when possible, but can also do 100/100 when needed.
Previous experience
- Degree in Computer science, Maths or a comparable field
- Design & development of Enterprise Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence systems
- Data analysis, problem solving, data modeling & design specific in petabyte scale data warehouse
- Data architecture, warehousing, master data management, enterprise information integration & ETL
- Design of large scale ETL solutions integrating multiple source systems in a global multinational environment
Required skills
- Leading and growing teams
- Accuracy with strong documentation skills
- Perform in a fast-changing, high-growth environment
- SQL
- Python, R, Matlab or similar tools
Nice to haves
- Non-relational database (MongoDB, Hadoop)
- Tracking tools (Mixpanel, Google Analytics, Adjust)
- Machine learning or data science applications