Crisp Data Contributes to Sunday Growth

Sunday is a lawn and garden care company offering customized plans using its “lawn engine,” which combines soil sample details with satellite mapping and local climate data. Its products are all made with non-toxic ingredients and were initially only available online. Then the company, which is based in Boulder, Colo., expanded into about 700 Walmart retail locations in 2021. Its products are now available in 5,200 retail locations, including Walmart and Lowe’s.

Today, more than 80 percent of Sunday’s lawn and garden product sales are through the retail outlets, but in the early days retail outlets were considered an experiment; the e-commerce side and the retail side of the business had very little interaction.

As the company grew, managing both its brick-and-mortar and online operations became more of a challenge, according to Jesse McClure, Sunday’s vice president of technology. “As you can imagine, the retail space and the e-commerce space are quite a bit different, but we needed to marry those two data sources together so we could get the synergy effect by layering what is going on in the retail space over what is going on online.”

As retail sales grew, Sunday executives knew they needed a solution to aggregate the different data sources. Combined, the different data streams provide much more insight for the company than either one would on its own, McClure explains. “I can learn a whole lot more with the aggregate dataset.”

And then, too, brand marketing, operations, and other parts of the business were being duplicated by the different sides.

“We realized we couldn’t continue down that pathway,” McClure recalls. “We needed to be running this as a single, cohesive business. We couldn’t keep doing things on spreadsheets and with semi-manual processes. We needed to bring the retail side into modern technology, just like we have on the e-commerce side.”

Sunday’s search began in the early spring of 2021. “That’s the peak of our season, and we didn’t have the answers to the questions that we were asking. We had to find a partner who could put this retail data into the rest of our ecosystem,” McClure says.

Internet searches yielded little results, as most of the solutions McClure found were either too expensive or had poor technology, inadequate support, or some combination thereof.

However, Crisp, a provider of open-data programmatic commerce platforms for the consumer goods industry, had the solution.

The Crisp software went live immediately, McClure says. “They plugged in their connectors and, all of a sudden, we had all of this data. It was like now we had all of this crude oil that we had been missing, and it’s up to us to refine it and start making decisions from it.”

With the data from Crisp, which Sunday runs through the Snowflake data platform, Sunday can evaluate trends, marketing decisions, and a variety of other factors. It also uses the data platform for additional analysis, obtaining insight on sales of different products, how those sales correlate with weather data, and more.

Sunday uses this analysis to plan promotions and orders around expected weather patterns and other trends and to see how well certain ads drive sales.

With Crisp, Sunday’s sales teams are more data-driven, according to McClure. “On our own, we would have been wandering through trying to piece our retail data strategy together.”

With the Crisp technology as well as other expansion efforts, Sunday grew conversions 20 percent in one month alone, retail store revenue grew 480 percent in in one year, and Google Trends searches for “Sunday Lawn” jumped 120 percent in a year.

So far, Sunday has been reactive in using the data from Crisp. Moving forward, though, McClure expects the company to be more proactive with its data. 

The Payoff

Since implementing Crisp as part of other marketing efforts, Sunday has achieved the following results:

• conversions improved by 20 percent in one month;
• retail sales grew 480 percent in one year; and
• brand awareness on Google Trends increased, with searches for “Sunday Lawn” growing 120 percent in one year.