Studio Retail names data chief

By

Nigel TAYLOR

Published
Jan 12, 2022

Value apparel and lifestyle digital retailer Studio Retail has promoted Gareth Powell to become overall director of data. He only joined the business in June as head of enterprise, data products and insight.

In his new, wider role he will lead the retailer’s new data programme, overseeing the creation of a data governance framework and the introduction of cloud data platforms Snowflake and Azure. 

He will also head Studio's newly-expanded data team, which brings together 35 positions across Studio’s analytics, data governance, data engineering and architecture.

Prior to joining Studio, Powell led telecommunications company TalkTalk’s insight and analytics in the 19 months to April 2021. He also spent 17 years at N Brown Group, where he was director of data science between June 2018 and October 2019.

Studio Retail chief executive Paul Kendrick said: “Gareth has a proven track record in data management, his skills are therefore pivotal to our ambitious plans to utilise data to grow and expand the business. We have already seen fantastic results from Gareth and look forward to seeing what he brings to an already strong leadership team on the challenging journey we have ahead of us.”

Powell added: “Since joining Studio… we have been on an exciting journey as a business. My vision is to make data and insights easy to access for our employees. A positive customer experience is underpinned by easy-to-access and good quality insight.”

He added: “We have successfully embedded a hub and spoke model for analytics which ensures we have close insight partnerships with our customer & digital, trading and customer experience teams, ensuring we utilise data in the most efficient way possible.”