Company
Classic Football Shirts
Location
Manchester, UK
Industry
Retail / E-commerce
Size
150
Data Warehouse
BigQuery
Website
About Classic Football Shirts
Classic Football Shirts (CFS) is a global retailer with one of the world's largest collections of authentic vintage, rare, and modern football shirts, kits, and memorabilia. Founded in Manchester in 2006, the company has grown from a student venture into a market leader in football apparel, expanding beyond vintage into current-season collections. With a global operation, CFS sources inventory through a wide network of channels, warehousing an ever-changing collection and selling through its online store and flagship retail locations in the UK and US.
The Challenge
For CFS, football shirts are not just products. They are pieces of history, culture, and identity. To run a business with thousands of unique SKUs, rapidly changing inventory, and customers across the world, data is critical to every decision. From choosing which kits to source, to setting pricing strategies, optimising marketing campaigns, managing stock turn, and fine-tuning logistics, the right insight at the right time can make a big difference to sales and customer experience.
As the company grew, CFS scaled its data function and brought in more data sources, attributes, and metrics. With each addition, complexity grew and so did the demands from the business. The existing BI tool was too static. Business users regularly exported dashboards into Excel just to answer a follow-up question. Development time for new dashboards could take days, creating frustrations when managers needed answers about sales performance, stock value, campaign conversion rates, or sell-through rates yesterday.
Every department, including retail, marketing, finance, operations, and customer service, had questions. "What were sales yesterday and how does that compare to last week?" "What are the top sellers?" "What is the margin for this category?" "How many new versus returning customers did we get this month?" The list went on. The demand was outpacing the team's ability to deliver.
The Solution with Veezoo
CFS explored its options. A conversation with their existing BI provider revealed no meaningful improvements over their current setup. Other Agentic solutions' licensing models raised concerns about costs increasing sharply as more users joined. Neither solution addressed the core problem: empowering everyone in the business to get answers fast without depending on the data team or static dashboards.
Veezoo took a different approach. In a Proof of Value focusing on sales metrics, the CFS team connected BigQuery to Veezoo and built a knowledge graph in under ten minutes. The CEO immediately began asking questions at all hours, getting clear, accurate answers without assistance. It was clear the platform could fundamentally change how the company worked with data.
Adoption was fast and organic. The most used dashboards were migrated into Veezoo within weeks, and the platform became the go-to for sales, stock, and forecasting queries. Today, it is used daily by Finance, Marketing, Retail, Operations, Buying and Merchandising, HR, Customer Services, and the Senior Leadership Team. A dedicated Veezoo Slack channel serves as a space for sharing queries, tips, and discoveries.
One of our main desires has been to break down the walls between departments, allowing seamless data and information sharing so every team can understand how the business is performing at a given time, a shared accountability, being able to see the impact they can have on driving opportunities and a proactive approach to risk management; Veezoo has allowed us to smash the walls down, not just break them
The Results
A standout moment came in a Senior Management Team meeting, when a question arose about comparing store performance. In the past, this would have meant making a note and producing a custom report days later. Instead, the data lead typed the question into Veezoo, used the Summarise Insights feature, and instantly received a clear answer with suggested follow-up questions. The feature was such a hit that Summarise Insights is now a company favourite.
What started as a Proof of Value on sales metrics has become the backbone of how Classic Football Shirts works with data. With every team now able to explore and share insights on their own, the data function can focus on what's next: bringing in new datasets, refining the knowledge graph, and staying ahead of a business that never stops moving.