How Hypebeast unified its global data stack with Lightdash

Meet Hypebeast

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Hypebeast is a global culture platform that transformed from a streetwear blog into a publicly listed company spanning media, commerce, and lifestyle ventures. For over 15 years, they have shared authentic culture through their platform and their expanding portfolio now includes specialized ventures in retail, golf, coffee, and other lifestyle segments.

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Every arm of the business is built on storytelling, and behind every story is data that fuels product decisions, performance reporting, and daily operations. So, the stakes for getting data right are high. But their setup made that harder than it should have been.

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The challenge: multiple tools, multiple problems

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Hypebeast’s BI environment had grown organically, and it showed. Each team operated in its own silo. They had separate BI tools (PowerBI, Looker, Tableau, Metabase), created their own metric definitions, and followed their own workflows. 

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That meant inconsistent insights, a lack of shared truth, and endless back-and-forths to explain the numbers. Business users couldn’t self-serve. The data team couldn’t scale. Everyone lost.

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Choosing a solution: why Lightdash?

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After exploring tools like Looker and ThoughtSpot, Hypebeast chose Lightdash because it offered:

• A developer-first design that felt intuitive, not restrictive
• A powerful semantic layer to serve as a single source of truth
• Native dbt integration, so they could reuse the work they’d already done
• An AI-ready architecture designed for modern data workflows
• And exceptional customer support that went above and beyond

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"Each Lightdash team member feels like a personal shopper. Highly attentive and genuinely invested in our success."
_{- Sami Rahman, Director of Data}

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The impact: beyond just dashboards 

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The shift to Lightdash transformed Hypebeast's data operations in significant ways. They unified their data ecosystem around a single semantic layer, establishing one source of truth across all business verticals. This transformation dramatically cut their delivery time for troubleshooting and creating data products.

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“We’ve cut delivery time down from 19 days to 1.3. That’s not just faster, it’s a different way of working.”
_{- Sami Rahman, Director of Data}

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Their data quality scores improved by 266%, enabling more confident business decisions across all units. At the same time, they reduced their BI tool spending by 72%.

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Because of one semantic layer and a single source of truth, our ability to take on requests and complete them within a short time has increased by 200%.
_{- Sami Rahman, Director of Data}

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Lightdash’s dev-friendly integration with dbt and GitHub also allowed the Hypebeast team to migrate with minimal friction. Dashboards are now built once and reused across teams, with consistent definitions that ensure everyone pulls from the same playbook. Teams can explore and customize their own analytics, freeing data teams to focus on strategy rather than support tickets.

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Looking ahead

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Hypebeast is now on track to completely phase out legacy BI tools. With AI agents in development and embedded charts powering other platforms, they're thinking beyond dashboards and building a culture of data literacy across the organization.

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“Lightdash helps us visualise data and shapes the way our business will think and work in the future.”
_{-Sami Rahman, Director of Data}

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Want to see similar results for your team? 

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Let’s chat about how Lightdash can help your team move faster, cleaner, and smarter. Just book a demo with a member of our team to get started.