Product descriptions:
Natura is a Brazilian beauty and personal care company with a deep commitment to sustainability, regenerative solutions and positive change. With over three million beauty consultants and 1,000 physical stores, in addition to e-commerce and a mobile app, Natura operates at a massive scale, and so does its data. Prior to Databricks, data was spread across multiple warehouses and tools, siloed by country, department, and team preference. To regain visibility, trust, and control at scale, Natura standardized on Databricks and Unity Catalog as the foundation of its data strategy.
Getting the full picture with a single platform
Prior to Databricks, Natura relied on multiple data warehouse strategies (Redshift, SAS and BigQuery), often isolating data access by department, country, or team preference for specific tools. “We did not have the full picture, and it was very chaotic,” said Daniel Goldszmit, Data Platform Specialist, Natura. “We knew we needed a single platform to aggregate all the information, and so we put all our efforts there.”
Natura began with a six-month proof of concept before selecting Databricks as its unified data and AI platform. Just two to three months after implementation, the team made an early decision to standardize on Unity Catalog as its governance foundation in a move that shaped nearly every integration that followed. This early decision allowed Natura to create around 90% of its integrations using Unity Catalog, leaving only around 100 processes to migrate from its previous Hive metastore on AWS Glue.
Natura has already consolidated several previous systems in Databricks (SAP ERP, Salesforce CRM, E-commece, App Informations), and successfully migrated all the associated users. Currently, Natura has almost 3,000 tables in Databricks, sourced from more than 170 sources. Every month, 1100 users leverage this data to analyze consumption.
Visibility, democratization and separation of data – the flexibility of Unity Catalog
Unity Catalog and its lineage feature were key to gaining visibility into how all its data was being used, in what ways, and by whom – and ensured Natura had the compliance and auditing capabilities necessary to efficiently run a secure business based on data. “The game changer to decide to move from the AWS Glue catalog to Databricks was the lineage feature in Unity Catalog,” said Goldszmit. “Without lineage, the team could not see who was using which products.”
By standardizing on Unity Catalog managed tables, Natura also unlocked performance and operational benefits, including predictive optimization, automatic liquid clustering, and AI-powered capabilities, without adding operational complexity for platform teams. AI/BI Genie ensures Natura engineers can easily “talk” to the data without having to refresh their SQL syntax, saving time and making the interaction feel more natural. The AI assistant also integrates deeply with Unity Catalog, speeding up development by suggesting joins, filters and column names. “The AI-generated comments are fantastic and help us accelerate our completeness of the catalog,” said Leonardo Litz, Sr Data Services Manager.
With Unity Catalog, Natura was able to democratize data access without sacrificing governance. The company adopted a federated hub-and-spoke operating model that empowers business units while maintaining centralized standards. The central data team is the hub that defines the rules and policies for how data can be used, and they build components that can be shared across teams. The business units are the spokes that use data to produce dashboards and products, in accordance with the rules and policies defined in the hub. “This model makes it super easy to manage, govern, apply best practices, and surface the knowledge users need to build their products,” said Goldszmit.
Unity Catalog also enables clear separation between data producers and consumers, supporting Natura’s long-term vision where individual product owners manage access to their data products independently, while platform teams define guardrails and standards. In their prior setup, Natura was operating under an open schema model. Unless the data was PII or restricted, they were sharing everything. With Databricks, they are in the process of reviewing how they create products and manage who can consume products. Natura’s goal is to have visibility into who is consuming from each product, which products are consuming from another product and to enable each product owner to manage the permissions for their product independently. All of this is easy to accomplish with the breadth and flexibility of governance and access options available in Unity Catalog.
Hour-by-hour monitoring on Black Friday 2025
This combination of visibility, governance, and real-time access proved critical during one of Natura’s most important business moments of the year: Black Friday. Real-time analytics allowed Natura to monitor sales hour by hour and adjust its Black Friday strategy and promotions. They could easily see what products were selling, how customers were responding to Black Friday sales and where they needed to switch tactics because a product was running out or sales weren’t resonating as well. “Using Databricks to monitor Black Friday led to the best Black Friday of all time,” said Guilherme Vargas, Analytics Engineer Manager.
Today, Natura supports more than 200 initiatives on Databricks, spanning operational analytics, manufacturing, CRM, and revenue-generating use cases. For Natura, Databricks, powered by Unity Catalog, is not just a data platform, but the foundation of its enterprise data strategy. According to Litz, the Natura CRM teams have operationalized the dashboards in manufacturing and leveraged CRM data produced inside Databricks to run initiatives that now generate 8% of their revenue. “Databricks is the center of the data strategy at Natura,” said Litz.