Product descriptions:
ZURU is a global product powerhouse reshaping categories in the world’s largest retailers. From fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) phenomena like Rascals diapers to viral toy sensations such as Bunch O Balloons and XSHOT, the company is known for disrupting markets with speed, innovation and scale. That same philosophy drove their efforts to modernize their data infrastructure. Now, with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform as their foundation, ZURU has automated complex marketing workflows and accelerated content innovation to drive faster, more impactful business outcomes.
Keeping pace with a fast-moving consumer business
ZURU operates at the intersection of speed, innovation and scale — with brands spanning FMCG, toys and emerging technologies. In marketing alone, the company runs thousands of campaigns and delivers hundreds of millions of impressions each week across platforms such as Google, Meta, TikTok and Pinterest. “The marketing team generates huge volumes of performance data,” Luke Hartfield, Senior Data Scientist at ZURU, said. “We’re responsible for surfacing insights on campaign and creative performance so the team can make faster, more confident decisions.”
Every week, the team processes performance data across thousands of campaigns and hundreds of millions of impressions — a scale that makes manual reporting unsustainable. What once required tedious spreadsheet work is now centralized, standardized and accessible in real time.
While marketing was the most urgent need, ZURU recognized broader opportunities. Sales, supply chain and category insights teams all required consolidated reporting and timely analysis. To keep pace with growth, the company needed a modern foundation that could unify data across the business and deliver insights in real time.
Orchestrating fast, cross-functional insights with the Databricks Platform
To meet these needs, ZURU selected the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform as the backbone of their modern data stack — built on AWS and designed for rapid development. “It was easy to get started, deliver proof of concepts and immediately show value. That speed was critical for us,” Luke explained.
Today, ZURU operates a robust, cloud-native infrastructure supporting 600-plus data pipelines and over 4,000 tables across dozens of catalogs. For marketing alone, this means dozens of platforms and millions of data points now flow into a single harmonized model — something that was previously impossible with spreadsheets. Data then feeds into visualization tools like Power BI and Tableau, where marketers and business users alike can explore campaign results, track performance by channel and compare creative assets side by side. This unified foundation ensures that everyone is working from the same numbers, accelerating alignment across teams. To power these workflows, the team leverages Unity Catalog for governance, workflow orchestration to manage complex pipelines and Databricks SQL for daily troubleshooting and exploration.
“It’s the unified nature of the platform that makes development fast,” Luke added. “Everything’s in one place — SQL, notebooks, orchestration. That makes collaboration seamless.”
Unlocking hours of productivity and a new frontier for AI growth
For ZURU’s marketing team, the shift has been transformative. Tasks that once required hours of pulling data from multiple ad platforms and manually stitching together reports are now completed in minutes. “Reporting cycles that once took days are now completed in minutes, eliminating hundreds of manual reports,” Luke said. This newfound efficiency has freed the team to focus on what truly drives results — optimizing creative strategies, experimenting with innovative approaches and scaling the campaigns that deliver the strongest impact.
With reliable, near real-time reporting, the team can answer questions on performance instantly instead of waiting for end-of-week or end-of-month reporting packs. This faster feedback loop has accelerated decision-making and strengthened collaboration with brand managers and creative teams.
Although marketing led the way, other functions are now beginning to realize value from the same foundation. Sales teams use consolidated data to track retailer performance, while supply chain stakeholders can overlay market trends and external signals to support planning decisions. By standardizing how data is processed and shared, ZURU ensures consistency in insights across the business. This is helping teams move away from siloed reporting toward a more connected, enterprise-wide view of performance.
With Databricks at the center of their data operations, ZURU has already scaled insights across every brand and campaign, surfacing thousands of performance signals daily and turning them into smarter, faster decisions. The next ambition is clear: to set the benchmark as the company that makes the most effective use of data in the industry. “As a business, we’re constantly testing and learning,” Luke said. “Databricks helps us see patterns quickly and act on them — so we can put more of our energy into creative innovation and growth.”
By combining their culture of speed and automation with modern data infrastructure, ZURU is building the marketing engine of the future — one that empowers teams with insights at the scale the business demands.