Maniko is a Berlin beauty brand for vegan UV gel strips and soft gel press ons. Since late 2023, Gemma Analytics has rebuilt Maniko's data platform step by step: from Y42 and Google Sheets to a modern data stack with BigQuery, dbt and Lightdash, plus a daily P&L that goes down to EBITDA.
The starting point
Maniko sells through its own Shopify shops and through drugstore chains such as dm, Rossmann and budni, so almost every reporting question needs online and retail kept apart. At the end of 2023, Y42 ran the data pipelines, while analysis, reporting and planning all lived in Google Sheets.
As the business and its data volumes grew, this setup stopped scaling. Spreadsheets referenced each other across tabs and had to be refreshed by hand, data refreshes kept breaking, and every new question meant yet another tab. Trust in the numbers suffered.
What we built
Gemma Analytics moved Maniko onto a modern data stack. Fivetran and Apache Airflow load every source automatically into Google BigQuery, from the Shopify shops and ad platforms such as Meta, Google Ads and TikTok to Klaviyo and Zendesk. In dbt, the raw data becomes tested, documented models that all reporting is built on. Tableau served as the first reporting tool.
On top of this platform, Gemma built a daily profit and loss statement. It covers the online shop and the drugstore retail business and runs from orders and net revenue through cost of goods sold, marketing and logistics and other operating costs down to EBITDA, in a daily and a weekly view. In the current stage, reporting moves from Tableau to Lightdash on a semantic layer defined in code, and AI agents built with Claude Code, such as an AI reviewer for pull requests, join the data team.
The result
Maniko starts every morning with yesterday's revenue and profit, down to EBITDA, with online and retail in one view. The team answers its own questions in Lightdash dashboards instead of opening another spreadsheet tab, and new data sources plug straight into one platform for the whole business. Gemma has also trained Maniko's in-house data team to adjust pipelines and models on its own, so the data function keeps up with the brand.
Tools and setup
Sources: Shopify, Google Analytics 4, Meta, Google Ads, TikTok, Pinterest, Bing Ads, Klaviyo, Zendesk, ClickUp, Typeform and Google Sheets, plus marketing attribution data. Fivetran and Apache Airflow handle ingestion and orchestration, Google BigQuery is the cloud data warehouse, and dbt covers modelling, testing and documentation. Lightdash replaces Tableau for self-service BI, reverse ETL sends data back to Klaviyo, and AI agents built with Claude Code support the team.