SANTA CRUZ, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Looker, a leading data platform company, today announced that PopSockets, maker of expandable phone grips, relies on the Looker data platform to establish and maintain a data-driven culture during its tremendous growth. By making data-driven decisions a priority, PopSockets ensures maximum efficiencies within the company, and protects the quality of its product for customers during its ongoing global growth.
“We strive to run our business by the numbers because if you’re not using data to measure and increase the performance of the business, you’re going to fail inevitably,” said Steven Mangold, senior business intelligence and analytics manager at PopSockets. “Massive growth creates a real challenge. We had to create an ecosystem where our employees could come ask data-based questions, receive an impactful answer and have the confidence to keep coming back to the well. We created a market segment at PopSockets and by implementing Looker, we have the numbers to drive that business.”
PopSockets experienced a 70,000 percent growth from 2014 to 2017 and in order to do this effectively, a stable of reporting was essential. By providing employees with a tool that allowed them to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively, PopSockets is able to streamline the global finance process close time nearly in half and drive the success of its charity program.
Accurate, Fast Data Collection
With Looker, PopSockets has real-time data to make important decisions and the finance department has automated and efficient tools to support sales, marketing, and operations. In addition to other benefits of deploying Looker, PopSockets is saving time and streamlining processes by limiting ad hoc reporting needs, including data presentation and related decisions required to ship, track, and account for products worldwide.
Tracking KPIs to Ensure Success of Charity Campaign
PopSockets’ Poptivism program invites users to: (1) upload graphic images at https://www.popsockets.com/pages/poptivism that will be turned into PopSockets Grips; and (2) select a charity to receive 50% of the proceeds from the sale of Grips bearing the image. Thousands of unique images are uploaded presenting unique data challenges. Prior to engaging Looker, PopSockets relied on contractors for key metrics such as how many images are accepted and rejected. Now PopSockets can now efficiently track these key metrics and how they change over time. Making this data widely available across the company has allowed the team to create a better experience for customers who in turn upload more images to raise more money for the charity.
Looker flexes and scales to provide a single source of truth to meet PopSockets’ ever-growing needs and data-focused culture. PopSockets plans to continue to roll-out the Looker Data Platform across the company in different departments at locations around the world.
About Looker
Looker is a unified data platform that delivers actionable business insights to employees at the point of decision. Looker integrates data into the daily workflows of users to allow organizations to extract value from data at web scale. Over 1700 industry-leading and innovative companies such as Sony, Amazon, The Economist, IBM, Spotify, Etsy, Lyft and Kickstarter have trusted Looker to power their data-driven cultures. The company is headquartered in Santa Cruz, California, with offices in San Francisco, New York, Boulder, London, Tokyo and Dublin, Ireland. Investors include CapitalG, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Meritech Capital Partners, Premji Invest, Redpoint Ventures and Goldman Sachs. For more information, connect with us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube or visit looker.com.
About PopSockets
David Barnett is the founder and CEO of PopSockets. He was a philosophy major at Emory, a physics major at the University of Colorado Boulder, received his PhD in philosophy from NYU, and from 2005-2015 was a philosophy professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research specialized in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, before he reached enlightenment, stopped doing philosophy, and became an entrepreneur.
In 2010, Barnett was looking for a way to stop his earbud cord from getting tangled, and he achieved this by gluing two buttons to the back of his phone and wrapping the earbud cord around the buttons. As ugly as the buttons were, they worked. In the course of improving on the idea, he developed about 60 different prototypes, making the buttons expand and collapse via an accordion mechanism, so that they could function as both a stand and a grip. In 2012, Barnett launched a KickStarter campaign for an iPhone case that would have two PopSockets grips integrated into the case. In addition to getting successfully funded, the KickStarter campaign enabled Barnett to show the world his dancing prowess. Two years later, in 2014, Barnett launched the business out of his garage in Boulder, Colorado, and has subsequently sold 100 million PopSockets grips around the world. PopSockets has donated over 3 million dollars in money and product to various non profits, and in Fall of 2018 PopSockets launched the Poptivism program- a charitable, give-back platform.
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