Italian Designer Looks to QlikTech to Extend Sales Network

QlikView Provides Perfect Fit for Expanding Gas Jeans Brand Into New Markets

LUND, SWEDEN – December 12, 2005 ─ Grotto S.p.A., the Italian designer of Gas Jeans and clothing, today announced that it has adopted QlikView, QlikTech’s innovative business analysis application, to help strengthen and expand its international sales network.  Gas clothing is a rare success story in the apparel industry, growing from a single store in the early nineties into a global fashion brand that is now distributed throughout more than 3,500 retail stores from London to Tokyo. 

Over the last decade Claudio Grotto, founder and president of Grotto, has led the company in its evolution from a retailer to a wholesaler and finally a designer and manufacturer of clothing.  Grotto’s progressive expansion and increasingly extensive sales network has made the company one of the most well-known clothing brands in the world.  Gas is now sold through thousands of stores in cities including London, Cairo, Tokyo, Cologne, Singapore, and Kuwait City among others. 

When it came to analyzing the huge volumes of information generated by the company’s skyrocketing growth, Grotto selected QlikView.  QlikView lets any Grotto employee interactively access and analyze sales, customer, product and store data on the fly, enabling them to do their jobs faster and more effectively.  QlikView simplifies analysis for everyone by enabling instant, in-memory manipulation of massive datasets on low-cost hardware, allowing affordable widespread deployment of sophisticated analytic applications in days.  With QlikView, Grotto gains business value quickly as they develop, modify, deploy, and – most importantly – use business intelligence applications to analyze and extend the company’s sales networks.

“QlikTech has had a tremendous impact on our company.  We have about 300 employees working at our main office plus another 1,500 colleagues who are divided up among the branches and manufacturing sites abroad,” remarked Carlo Pase, CIO of Grotto.  “QlikView empowers our employees with access to the information they need to do their jobs better.  Together we are working to build Gas into one of the leading Italian brands world-wide, and QlikTech is helping us to achieve that goal.”

QlikTech is leading a new class of easy-to-use, fast and flexible business analysis solutions that empower individuals to improve corporate performance and drive innovation.  QlikView extends the company’s vision of simplifying business analysis, offering solutions that can be deployed in days, where users can be trained in minutes, and where end-users have the freedom to be more creative in their analyses.

“We are very excited to be working with Grotto, one of the leading international brands in the apparel industry.  The company has an innovative approach to design and manufacturing, and the management team has realized that the key to continued growth is to personally empower individuals within the company to do their best,” said Anthony Deighton, Vice President of Marketing at QlickTech.  “QlikView will arm Grotto employees with the access and ability to analyze the data they need to excel in everything they do.”