PRADA Group is a global luxury fashion leader with a portfolio of iconic brands including Prada, Miu Miu, Church’s and Versace. As the company continues to expand its global retail and digital presence, delivering highly personalized and seamless customer experiences has become a central strategic priority. To support this vision, PRADA Group leveraged Databricks Lakebase to build a unified data and AI foundation across all brands and corporate functions that delivers consistent, trusted and real-time business metrics across thousands of retail touchpoints. With Lakebase as the foundation, PRADA Group is redefining how intelligence is embedded across the enterprise, shifting from static reporting to a real-time, API-driven model of decision-making that powers every interaction, from store floor to corporate strategy.
Scaling consistent, real-time intelligence across retail operations
Across PRADA Group’s global retail network, every customer interaction depends on timely, trusted data. Store associates, digital teams and commercial leaders rely on KPIs such as customer profiles, product performance, revenue trends and campaign effectiveness to make decisions in real time and deliver a more personalized luxury experience.
The challenge: fragmented KPI delivery across brands and channels
As these use cases expanded, from in-store customer engagement to enterprise-wide performance tracking, the need for consistent and scalable omnichannel KPI delivery became crucial.
Legacy data systems further compounded the challenge. KPI data was delivered in batch cycles only a few times per day, leaving employees across stores and digital channels often working with outdated information. In-store applications that supported customer advisors also experienced latency when retrieving customer insights, slowing down interactions at the point of engagement.
These limitations created friction across both operational and strategic workflows, underscoring the need for a modern data foundation that delivers consistent, real-time intelligence at scale across all brands and channels.
“It wasn’t only about fragmented data that hurt our ability to support the business effectively,” explained Anna Codispoti, Head of Data Analytics at PRADA Group. “It was the fact that different teams were looking at different versions of the truth.”
Building a unified KPI factory powered by Lakebase
PRADA Group chose to build its data foundation on Databricks, using Lakebase as the real-time serving layer for enterprise metrics. The goal was to establish a single, governed system where KPIs are defined once, consistently calculated and made available across all brands, channels and applications.
Exposing trusted metrics across applications
Within this architecture, Databricks serves as the central engine for KPI computation, while Lakebase exposes these metrics as a low-latency microservice. The approach allows applications to retrieve trusted business metrics in real time without duplicating logic or rebuilding transformations downstream, including:
Store-facing tools
E-commerce platforms
Internal BI dashboards
Agents and AI tools
With Unity Catalog providing a unified governance layer across PRADA Group’s data estate, all enterprise datasets, from CRM and SAP to product and marketing systems, are standardized, secured and made consistent across brands, geographies and channels. This governed foundation ensures that every KPI served through Lakebase is built on trusted, well-defined and fully traceable data.
As Michele Piunti, Data Platform Manager at PRADA Group, explained, “We moved from batch-driven KPI delivery to a microservices layer where every KPI is exposed as an API. This fundamentally changes how model-driven and service-based applications interact with data because everything becomes real-time and service-based.”
"This has been instrumental in unlocking the full potential of our data, enabling a shift from fragmented insights to scalable, data-driven business impact,” said Codispoti. The advantage PRADA Group gains is not just speed. Now every channel can consume the same KPI in the same way, without reimplementing logic or creating different interpretations of the same metric.
Enabling real-time decisions across global retail operations
With Lakebase in production, PRADA Group has shifted from delayed, batch-based reporting to near real-time delivery of KPIs across its global retail network, enabling faster and more consistent decision-making across stores, digital channels and corporate teams.
Store associates now have immediate access to customer and performance insights directly within their applications, allowing them to understand customer profiles, purchase history and behavioral signals during live interactions. What previously required waiting for dashboards to load now happens in milliseconds.
This has significantly improved:
Operational efficiency and customer engagement quality
Campaign responsiveness
Segmentation accuracy
Timely business decisions
Clienteling operations
Teams across marketing and retail can act on fresher data. They have gone from seeing KPIs two or three times a day to having them refreshed continuously. Beyond speed and consistency, PRADA Group has also improved data confidence across the organization.
“The biggest change is not only speed, but trust,” said Codispoti. “When everyone is looking at the same numbers and knows they are up to date, it changes how confidently people can act on the data.”
Looking ahead, PRADA Group sees Lakebase as a foundation for more dynamic and AI-driven workflows, where real-time data services will support intelligent agents, adaptive decisioning systems and more responsive supply chain and retail operations.