Blending Tradition and Innovation on the Analytics Journey

With over a century of helping people mark life’s moments, Hallmark has always been a name synonymous with tradition, sentiment, and connection. Yet in today’s fast-paced world, even the most beloved institutions know they must reinvent how they work if they want to deliver for both the present and the future.

For Hallmark, the challenge was familiar to any long-standing business: how to scale and modernise their analytics capabilities so that every card, gift and customer relationship could benefit from real-time, data-driven insights, without losing the personal touch that defines their brand.

Meeting Hallmark Where They Were

When Hallmark reached out to InterWorks, they were already on the path, having invested in data and upskilling their teams. Driven by the goal of solidifying themselves as an innovation leader in their industry, they wanted a partner who could offer not just guidance, but practical, business-ready solutions. InterWorks joined at a crucial inflection point, an inflection marked by the need to refresh ways of working and, crucially, free analysts from the tedium of manual data prep.

Laying the Right Foundations

InterWorks’ first task was straightforward: relieve the burden of manual reporting by automating data flows with Alteryx Designer and Server. This was more than a technical win — it marked a sea change for Hallmark’s analytics teams, allowing them to dedicate time and creativity to higher-value, strategic analysis instead of endless Excel routines.

With robust, automated feeds in place, attention turned to surfacing insight. High-value, best-practice Tableau dashboards replaced static spreadsheets, and Tableau Server ushered in a new era of self-serve analytics. Suddenly, decision-makers across Hallmark were empowered with timely, actionable insight: The gateway to faster, more confident business decisions.

Unlocking New Possibilities

These successes did not go unnoticed. Leadership and executives quickly bought in, giving the analytics team the space and support to drive even bigger ambitions. The next challenge loomed: Enable seamless, secure data sharing with Hallmark’s external partners and customers. Traditional IT infrastructure made sharing insights beyond Hallmark’s walls a real challenge, threatening to put the brakes on further innovation.

Once again, Hallmark and InterWorks partnered to navigate the next phase: Adopting Snowflake and Tableau Cloud. We delivered a Snowflake Rapid Start to ensure that Hallmark started their Snowflake journey with best-practice CDW architecture and governance principles. We also re-factored legacy analytics use-cases from on-premise SQL to the new Snowflake environment, implementing push-down architecture to leverage Snowflake’s compute resources.

Undertaking this work didn’t just unlock the latest analytics innovations that come with the cloud. It gave Hallmark new freedom to collaborate beyond organisational boundaries, deliver customer-facing analytics and radically reduce dependence on homegrown IT, all while keeping security and governance at the core.

A Partnership that Drives Continuous Growth

Transformation at Hallmark wasn’t a one-off event. At every step, the approach remained the same: Guide, empower and educate, always building solutions that fit Hallmark’s reality and aspirations. The result? Enthusiastic executive sponsorship, positive reviews from users and a culture where analysts and business leaders alike can focus on what matters most: Insight, innovation and connection.

The Result

What began as a drive to modernise manual reporting has become a holistic journey into the future of business intelligence. Hallmark now enjoys cloud-native analytics, empowered analysts, delighted business partners and most importantly, a culture open to change.

“Under their current leadership, Hallmark’s D+A function have something that many organisations struggle to develop: a fully-engaged, curious team of analysts who are encouraged to spend time on discovery and innovation as well as the typical BAU-type reporting workloads. This is just one of the reasons we’ve enjoyed working with Hallmark over the last few years as they’ve evolved their analytics function.”

— Jim Horbury, Strategy Director, UKI

Step by step, Hallmark has proven that respecting the past and embracing the future aren’t mutually exclusive. With the right data, and the right partnership, even the most time-honoured brands can find new ways to connect, with their people, their partners and their customers.