This yr, as a part of its annual Halloween shopper survey and report, the NRF anticipated U.S. customers to spend $10.6 billion on Halloween costumes, surpassing final yr’s already record-breaking quantity. A rising portion of this spend, $700 million in 2022, is towards pet costumes. And we are able to’t blame them. Under are a few of our personal Brickster’s pet costumes – how will you resist?
For some post-Halloween enjoyable, we thought it’d be an ideal alternative to dive deeper into these shopper developments and insights utilizing Databricks. Extra particularly, we wished to reply questions similar to: what are the most well-liked Halloween costumes for pets, and, how a lot are individuals keen to spend on pet costumes?
This weblog walks by way of how we answered these questions utilizing knowledge from Chewy, a number one on-line retailer of pet provides, and Databricks SQL. Not solely is that this an amazing excuse to have a look at some cute pet pics, nevertheless it additionally gives insights right into a rising shopper market and showcases just a few potential use instances simplified by the Databricks Lakehouse Platform.
Our Strategy
The Lakehouse is a one-stop store for all of your knowledge wants, and this venture served as a superb instance to reiterate that. Inside just a few hours, we had been capable of develop an end-to-end resolution to extract, retailer and visualize this info whereas offering fascinating enterprise insights. If we had used conventional strategies, we must:
- Use a instrument to run python scripts,
- Use a database to retailer this data in several tables and
- Use a BI instrument to create completely different visualizations
This may increasingly have led to prolonged growth and the involvement of various personas. Nevertheless, the Databricks Lakehouse Platform empowers the tip person to leverage all these capabilities with only a few clicks.
For this venture, we used publicly accessible knowledge from Chewy, particularly from the costume part of their Halloween store. We chosen this knowledge set as a result of Chewy is without doubt one of the hottest pet retail web sites, all of the Halloween gadgets are conveniently categorized collectively, and it presents 100+ Halloween costumes. To seize this info from Chewy, we used an open supply python library referred to as stunning soup and had been capable of seize costume metadata together with costume identify, model, class, value and variety of opinions. Utilizing the Databricks platform’s Python capabilities we had been capable of parse every merchandise’s overview knowledge in only a few minutes.
As soon as collected, we loaded this info right into a Delta Desk, after which we used Databricks SQL to develop completely different metrics, which gave us the next insights.
The Hottest Pet Costumes of 2022
The primary query we answered was: what are the most well-liked Halloween pet costumes this yr? Whereas Chewy doesn’t present the gross sales for every costume itemizing, we used buyer overview knowledge to drive our personal insights. For our evaluation, we ranked the recognition of a dressing up primarily based on the variety of product opinions of every itemizing. For instance, a product with the best variety of opinions can be outlined because the hottest. With this strategy, we ranked the ten hottest costumes:
There may be some alignment with NRF’s shopper survey, performed in September; extra particularly, they recognized a bee, pumpkin, and lion as among the many 10 hottest costumes.
Whereas this gave us a normal concept of what’s trending, we wanted a bigger snapshot to acquire broader insights. To present us a extra holistic view, we created a visible with all the 100+ costumes categorized. Notice that Chewy gives a bigger variety of classes and costume sorts, so we bundled these collectively to create 9 distinct classes. For instance, trending describes costumes with pop-culture references, whereas traditional describes conventional costumes like a pumpkin or pirate.
Because the above chart reveals, Trending and Humorous had been total the most well-liked classes for customers. This does appear to align with the truth that, as said within the above survey, social media is a big, and rising, issue for Halloween costume inspiration. With this in thoughts, dressing your pet in one thing comical or in reference to a trending/pop-culture theme is prone to garner extra consideration than a conventional, less-original costume.
Understanding The Buyer
One other facet that closely influences buying choices is pricing. This piqued our curiosity: How a lot are customers keen to spend on their pets for Halloween?
To seek out out, we created 4 pricing tiers, with lower than $10 on the low finish and $20-$25 the excessive finish (just one costume exceeded $25, which we deemed an outlier). We then segmented the recognition as follows:
- 4.5 stars or greater: Most Appreciated
- 4.0 – 4.49 stars: Very Common
- 3.5 – 3.99 stars: Common
- 3.0 – 3.49 stars: Mildy Common
- Lower than 3 stars: Not Appreciated
Right here’s the ultimate end result:
The above chart reveals that the most well-liked gadgets are most frequently the least costly, with a overwhelming majority falling between $10 and $15. This does make sense, nevertheless, because it appears unrealistic to count on customers to drop a small fortune on a dressing up that can theoretically be worn as soon as – particularly with social media being an enormous driver, and an growing strain to be completely different and stand out annually.
Many Databricks prospects carry out superior analytics to grasp buyer intent and sentiment. Whereas our limitations prevented us from performing something almost as strong – by a protracted shot – we determined to make use of the precise buyer opinions to create a phrase cloud:
Because the above visible reveals, the largest standards for patrons is that the costume was cute, whereas phrases like high quality and materials are deemed of decrease significance. Basically, aesthetics trump every little thing else.
Conclusion
Whereas this weblog submit is meant to showcase analytics with Databricks by way of a enjoyable use case, it does present a glimpse into a number of the insights Databricks SQL can drive in a fraction of the time with conventional knowledge architectures. When you discovered this fascinating, try our weblog 100 Years of Horror Movies: An Evaluation Utilizing Databricks SQL.
