Natura Bissé cuts time-to-insight from one week to seconds with Astrato and BigQuery

Natura Bissé is a global luxury skincare company known for scientifically-backed products, highly personalized treatments, and a premium brand experience trusted by consumers and professionals alike.

Headquartered in Barcelona and fully vertically integrated, with all manufacturing happening in Spain, the company of around 400 people serves customers across some 60 countries through luxury retail, e-commerce, day-spas, and many of the world's leading luxury hotels, including partners such as Ritz-Carlton, Mandarin Oriental, and Four Seasons.

Lluís Uriach leads Natura Bissé's global hotel channel and a number of strategic initiatives across the company, working closely with the CEO. One of those initiatives, started two years ago, was making the company's data accessible to everyone who needed it.

“It was one of the key strategic initiatives when we started, and today it's becoming more and more important. It's helping us drive change in the organization as a whole,” Lluís Uriach said.

The challenge: global insights buried under a week of manual Excel work

Natura Bissé's challenge was never a lack of appetite for data. Leadership relied on it heavily. The problem was access: data sat in different systems and affiliate-specific ERP structures, and pulling it together depended on manual processes and Excel reports.

“Natura Bissé is a data-driven company, and the leadership relies a lot on data, but access to data was not always easy. Data was scattered across different teams, and collecting it and making it accessible relied on many manual processes,” Lluís Uriach said.

Static spreadsheets created a deeper organizational cost: competing versions of the truth.

“Once you ship a report in Excel, you cannot easily update it. What that creates is different teams, different data, and many times meetings in the company started with a discussion on what's the source of truth. It was a waste of time trying to convince each other of what was the good number,” Lluís Uriach said.

For Lluís Uriach, the pain was immediate and personal. The hotel channel he leads is global, serving the same luxury hotel groups through five affiliates, each with its own local approach. Compiling a global view meant reconciling product naming differences and currencies across markets, by hand.

“Being able to get all the data from the different affiliates and combine it at speed was a game changer for me and for my teams,” Lluís Uriach said. “In the past, every affiliate was working in the hotel channel with a separate and differentiated approach. It prevented us from having a global perspective with that level of detail.”

The decision: a fresh BigQuery and Astrato build the business could own

The project began as a convergence of two forces: the CEO's ambition for the whole company to step up on data, and Lluis Lluís Uriach's practical need for a unified global view of his channel.

“Having the endorsement of top leadership is critical for this kind of project. We were fortunate to have a CEO willing to do this project, and to do it in the right way,” Lluís Uriach said.

Natura Bissé brought in Propelling Tech, a data & AI consultancy, which began with a technology-agnostic assessment of the company's data landscape and its short-, mid- and long-term needs. The recommendation: a Google Cloud architecture with Astrato as the BI layer, built from scratch from data ingestion to the final dashboards rather than migrating what existed.

“It wasn't a migration effort. We wanted to start fresh and provide all the value that the tools and our business knowledge could offer,” said Emili Bonilla, Partner at Propelling Tech.

The combination fitted Natura Bissé's starting point. The company already had data landing in BigQuery through Google Analytics, and its internal team had solid SQL knowledge, while the business needed an architecture that didn't demand advanced technical skills.

“The ease of use of BigQuery combined with the no-code approach of Astrato was the perfect combination. It sped up development at the beginning while allowing Natura Bissé to take ownership of the solution after the rollout,” Bonilla said.

Proof in two weeks: a pilot with sub-second answers

To prove the approach, Propelling Tech built a working pilot in two weeks: all of Natura Bissé's sales information, unified down to the lowest level of granularity (SKU, customer, and day), presented as a dynamic application that moved from an executive overview down to tactical views.

“Being able to navigate this information and drill down to any level of detail with sub-second response, combined with the insights engine providing natural-language suggestions, was a game changer for them,” Emili Bonilla said.

For Lluís Uriach, a veteran of the established BI platforms, the pilot was decisive.

“I had worked with the well-known BI platforms like QlikView, Tableau, and Power BI, but I discovered Astrato with this project. When I tried it for the first time, I was amazed. I remember waiting a couple of minutes for something to load in previous BI tools. When you get used to the speed you get with Astrato, you will never be able to go back to other tools,” Lluís Uriach said.

Because Astrato queries BigQuery directly, with no extracts and no copies, every team works from the same live data. For the business, that architecture translated into something simpler: trust.

“Knowing that all the teams are working on the same database gives you trust. It gives me peace of mind that all the teams are working with the same data set at the same time,” Lluís Uriach said.

Value from day one, trust built at the source

Rather than a long build followed by a big reveal, the implementation delivered usable dashboards from the start. Lluís Uriach was using Astrato for his day-to-day work from the very beginning, with core dashboards in place within about six months. The hardest problem wasn't the platform: it was the quality of the source data, including years of business logic hardcoded into SQL queries in legacy middleware.

“We created a plan to fix all the possible issues in the source systems, avoiding workarounds that create technical debt for the future. It delayed the initial rollout a little, but it created a lot of trust in the whole platform,” Emili Bonilla said.

“Part of the time we spent was because we realized our data was not ready for this kind of project. The limiting factor was more on our side than the tool or the Propelling team,” Lluís Uriach said.

The rollout strategy was designed for adoption. Existing Excel reports served as the inspiration for familiar detail tables, with new storytelling views built on top, so users recognized their data while discovering better ways to look at it.

“Change management is always a key element, and we wanted users to feel familiar with the new interface. We used the existing Excel templates as inspiration for the detail tables, but built storytelling views on top to make sure they were getting all the value out of Astrato,” Emili Bonilla said.

Natura Bissé's own team ran the same play internally, developing what they call “click cases”: for each key user, one simple, high-impact use case demonstrating exactly how Astrato changes their daily work.

“We identified a very simple use case that could potentially change their lives. We called them 'click cases' internally. When they see the specific use case that really helps them, the approach to adoption completely changes,” Lluís Uriach said. “It's all about being empathetic with the end user. Changing ways of working is not always easy.”

From one week to seconds: faster insights, stronger partner relationships

The clearest measure of change is time-to-insight. Compiling a global analysis of the hotel channel, with data from every affiliate aligned and combined, used to take Lluís Uriach around a week. Today it takes seconds.

“Getting the data from the hotel channel across the different affiliates, putting all the information together and getting the insights took me maybe one week. Now I can do the same in a matter of seconds,” Lluís Uriach said.

Speed changed not just how fast answers arrive, but how many questions get asked. Moving quickly between views surfaces insights that would never have justified a week of manual work. And the impact reaches beyond Natura Bissé's own walls: with unified data, conversations with partners have changed character. Some partners now share their sell-out data, giving both sides a complete view of the business.

“With some of our partners, we have achieved a level of trust where they share their sell-out data with us. Combining what we sell to them with the visibility of their sell-out gives you a whole new way of talking and interacting with them,” Lluís Uriach said. “This platform is allowing us to establish a more trustful, clear and transparent relationship. Transforming data into insight and insights into a tailored value proposition for partners”

Adoption tells its own story. It began with corporate finance, marketing and digital teams, but it is now growing fastest among commercial teams in the affiliates, where usage is entirely voluntary.

“When local teams leverage this, it's because it's really, really adding value for them,” Lluís Uriach said. “In the past, many teams relied on the technical teams to pull the data and even prepare reports. Now teams have access to all the data, and more and more you see them using Astrato to prepare their own dashboards.”

Scaling to 100 users without scaling costs

Ask Lluís Uriach about return on investment and he reframes the question. For Natura Bissé, the point was never to spend less on analytics. It was to get more out of everything the business does.

“Our approach was not to save cost. Our aim was to benefit from data to add more value in everything that we do,” Lluís Uriach said. “The faster you get the data and the insights, the better you add value to your customers.”

What the architecture does is make that ambition affordable to scale. Astrato's licensing covers 100 users, so adoption could spread from corporate teams to the affiliates without a per-seat penalty, and because Astrato pushes computation down to the warehouse, growth in usage doesn't mean growth in infrastructure. With pipelines for sales, digital, and financial data reloading several times a day, Natura Bissé's entire Google Cloud footprint runs on a few hundred euros a month.

“We are very focused on designing solutions that optimize cloud spend. On the Astrato side, they got access for 100 users at a price almost half of what the Fabric subscription would have cost,” Emili Bonilla said.

The same efficiency shows up in how quickly new value ships. For Propelling Tech, time not spent wrestling with proprietary syntax is time spent building the next use case.

“Astrato reduces the learning curve. Our consultants no longer need to learn complex DAX or Set Analysis syntax. Combined with the fact that it inherits all the security and business logic defined in the data warehouse, we are able to deliver more than twice as fast as with other technologies,” Emili Bonilla said.

An AI-ready foundation for what comes next

Natura Bissé's roadmap extends the same foundation: bringing production-side systems into BigQuery and Astrato, enriching analyses with third-party data, and, with clean, well-structured data now in place, applying AI to add value to our partners.

“Once you have well-structured data, applying AI can be another game-changer. AI is amazing, but if you don't have good data, it will not give you its full potential,” Lluís Uriach said.

Asked why this project succeeded where so many data initiatives stall, the partner's answer mirrors the customer's.

“The success of this project was a combination of three aspects: state-of-the-art technologies in BigQuery and Astrato, partner experience in the industry, and close collaboration with the customer's stakeholders to co-create the solutions hand in hand,” Emili Bonilla said.

“Sometimes it's good to stop, reflect, and clarify what you are really looking for. First, use paper and pen, and then start working. Spending some time on what you want to achieve is key for success,” Lluís Uriach said.

‍