This 12 months, as a part of its annual Halloween shopper survey and report, the NRF anticipated U.S. shoppers to spend $10.6 billion on Halloween costumes, surpassing final 12 months’s already record-breaking quantity. A rising portion of this spend, $700 million in 2022, is towards pet costumes. And we are able to’t blame them. Beneath are a few of our personal Brickster’s pet costumes – how will you resist?

For some post-Halloween enjoyable, we thought it’d be an ideal alternative to dive deeper into these shopper tendencies and insights utilizing Databricks. Extra particularly, we wished to reply questions corresponding to: what are the most well-liked Halloween costumes for pets, and, how a lot are individuals prepared to spend on pet costumes? 

This weblog walks by how we answered these questions utilizing information from Chewy, a number one on-line retailer of pet provides, and Databricks SQL. Not solely is that this an incredible excuse to take a look at some cute pet pics, nevertheless it additionally gives insights right into a rising shopper market and showcases a number of potential use circumstances simplified by the Databricks Lakehouse Platform.

Our Method

The Lakehouse is a one-stop store for all of your information wants, and this mission served as a great instance to reiterate that. Inside a number of hours, we had been capable of develop an end-to-end resolution to extract, retailer and visualize this data whereas offering fascinating enterprise insights. If we had used conventional strategies, we must:

• Use a software to run python scripts,
• Use a database to retailer this data in several tables and
• Use a BI software to create totally different visualizations

This may increasingly have led to prolonged improvement and the involvement of various personas. Nonetheless, the Databricks Lakehouse Platform empowers the tip person to leverage all these capabilities with just some clicks.

For this mission, we used publicly accessible information from Chewy, particularly from the costume part of their Halloween store. We chosen this information set as a result of Chewy is among the hottest pet retail web sites, all of the Halloween gadgets are conveniently categorized collectively, and it affords 100+ Halloween costumes. To seize this data from Chewy, we used an open supply python library known as stunning soup and had been capable of seize costume metadata together with costume title, model, class, worth and variety of critiques. Utilizing the Databricks platform’s Python capabilities we had been capable of parse every merchandise’s evaluate information in just some minutes.

As soon as collected, we loaded this data right into a Delta Desk, after which we used Databricks SQL to develop totally different metrics, which gave us the next insights.

The Hottest Pet Costumes of 2022

The primary query we answered was: what are the most well-liked Halloween pet costumes this 12 months? Whereas Chewy doesn’t present the gross sales for every costume itemizing, we used buyer evaluate information to drive our personal insights. For our evaluation, we ranked the recognition of a fancy dress based mostly on the variety of product critiques of every itemizing. For instance, a product with the best variety of critiques can be outlined because the hottest. With this method, we ranked the ten hottest costumes:

There’s some alignment with NRF’s shopper survey, performed in September; extra particularly, they recognized a bee, pumpkin, and lion as among the many 10 hottest costumes. 

Whereas this gave us a common thought of what’s trending, we wanted a bigger snapshot to acquire broader insights. To offer us a extra holistic view, we created a visible with the entire 100+ costumes categorized. Be aware that Chewy gives a bigger variety of classes and costume varieties, so we bundled these collectively to create 9 distinct classes. For instance, trending describes costumes with pop-culture references, whereas traditional describes conventional costumes like a pumpkin or pirate.

Because the above chart exhibits, Trending and Humorous had been general the most well-liked classes for shoppers. This does appear to align with the truth that, as said within the above survey, social media is a big, and rising, issue for Halloween costume inspiration. With this in thoughts, dressing your pet in one thing comical or in reference to a trending/pop-culture theme is more likely to garner extra consideration than a conventional, less-original costume.

Understanding The Buyer 

One other side that closely influences buying choices is pricing. This piqued our curiosity: How a lot are shoppers prepared to spend on their pets for Halloween?

To seek out out, we created 4 pricing tiers, with lower than $10 on the low finish and $20-$25 the excessive finish (just one costume exceeded $25, which we deemed an outlier). We then segmented the recognition as follows:

• 4.5 stars or larger: Most Appreciated
• 4.0 – 4.49 stars: Very In style
• 3.5 – 3.99 stars: In style
• 3.0 – 3.49 stars: Mildy In style
• Lower than 3 stars: Not Appreciated

Right here’s the ultimate consequence: 

The above chart exhibits that the most well-liked gadgets are most frequently the least costly, with a overwhelming majority falling between $10 and $15. This does make sense, nonetheless, because it appears unrealistic to anticipate shoppers to drop a small fortune on a fancy dress that can theoretically be worn as soon as – particularly with social media being an enormous driver, and an growing stress to be totally different and stand out every year.

Many Databricks prospects carry out superior analytics to grasp buyer intent and sentiment. Whereas our limitations prevented us from performing something practically as strong – by an extended shot – we determined to make use of the precise buyer critiques to create a phrase cloud:

Because the above visible exhibits, the largest standards for patrons is that the costume was cute, whereas phrases like high quality and materials are deemed of decrease significance. Primarily, aesthetics trump all the pieces else.

Conclusion

Whereas this weblog publish is meant to showcase analytics with Databricks by a enjoyable use case, it does present a glimpse into a few of the insights Databricks SQL can drive in a fraction of the time with conventional information architectures. In case you discovered this fascinating, take a look at our weblog 100 Years of Horror Movies: An Evaluation Utilizing Databricks SQL.