The clothing manufacturer’s IT chief has a foot in every aspect of the tech stack – and is placing data and AI at the centre of future digital strategy
Vivek Bharadwaj, CIO at clothing manufacturer Happy Socks, is an executive with an expansive portfolio. In addition to leading enterprise-wide technology strategy, IT transformation and digital marketing, he oversees the company’s back-end systems, e-commerce roadmaps, cyber security measures, and data engineering and analysis.
In short, Bharadwaj has to wear a lot of hats – or, as Computer Weekly suggests to him, a lot of socks. It’s a sentiment with which Bharadwaj concurs: “I can look across our different functions, pull up the red threads as and when I see them, and find commonality in processes.”
Bharadwaj previously held senior data and marketing roles with Canadian retailer Hudson’s Bay and higher education specialist General Assembly. He joined Happy Socks as a consultant in August 2023 to optimise the company’s data and digital marketing foundations. He became chief data officer in January 2024 and was promoted to CIO in May 2024.
“My role now spans the entire tech stack,” he says. “That responsibility stretches from the data infrastructure to e-commerce experiences. I see synergy across all these areas, and in the way that, for example, we run a lean, data-driven marketing stack to manage marketing optimisation.”
Walking the walk
Bharadwaj’s role at Happy Socks is his first CIO position. For someone with a background in data and marketing, how has he found taking responsibility for enterprise technology? The answer is: so far, so good.
“It’s been a phenomenal learning experience,” he says. “I still pride myself, much to my team’s chagrin, that I like to go into the pull requests that my team needs to fix. But the value I bring is that I can see the landscape from a higher perspective. I’m able to make cross-business connections.”
Palamon Capital Partners acquired a majority share of Happy Socks in 2018. Today, Bharadwaj says the executive team has a clear sense of direction. He works in concert with his peers to consider how data, technology and digital services can help support business operations and customer services.
“Each executive comes into the role with an existing deep skillset, but then that capability is followed by saying, ‘Here’s what else we can do’,” he says.
“We’re operators at our heart; we like to walk the walk. The thesis I came in to Happy Socks with was the idea that access to information is what breaks down silos in the business and can lead to better decision-making processes.”
As Bharadwaj moved into the CIO role, he started to think about broad, tech-enabled goals. Rather than just responding reactively to business demands, he has attempted to create a proactive approach that focuses on developing an integrated technology stack. He says that approach requires answers to some big questions.
“My role now spans the entire tech stack, from the data infrastructure to e-commerce experiences. I see synergy across all these areas”
Vivek Bharadwaj, Happy Socks
“What do we think about the build-versus-buy scenario? What work should we do in-house and what technologies should we buy from outside? How do we manage the conundrum of being a service-oriented technology partner to our business units but, at the same time, also enforcing certain core ideas around security, governance and data transparency?” he says.
“Those sorts of considerations are crucial in the privacy-aware, GDPR-first world that we operate within. So, those are the pushes and pulls we deal with – growth versus efficiency, security versus enablement, empowerment via self-service versus helping the business with best practices. It’s these trade-offs that make this role interesting.”
Establishing AI guidelines
One of Bharadwaj’s biggest achievements has been establishing an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered business process transformation unit to boost operations across sales, logistics, marketing and planning. He says this new unit is evidence of the company’s conscious desire to invest in responsible AI.
“We have proper guardrails in place,” he says. “We focus on those key human-in-the-loop aspects and ensure we are concentrating on improving our business processes, rather than exposing AI features to our customers, which is a more uncertain area, because things keep changing all the time.”
“We are automatically generating and improving our product descriptions, and adding meta information using SEO-rich keywords, using a Streamlit app that we built on Cortex,” he says, suggesting the technology has helped boost the breadth of keywords that the company uses and has increased organic search performance on the web.
Bharadwaj says Happy Socks is open to using other AI models. The company works with several providers and LLMs to run AI-based recommendation services, such as for email marketing to customers. All these projects run on standalone stacks.
“The beauty of our approach is that the apps are hosted inside our systems,” says Bharadwaj. “That approach makes the process of test and learn much better. We can consider the different models, such as thinking about whether we want to move, for example, from Llama to Gemini. Our whole approach is platform-agnostic.”
Bharadwaj aims to ensure that the company’s AI policies provide consistent answers to the build-versus-buy question.
“The whole idea is that we are running Snowflake Cortex and creating Streamlit apps, and we want to keep that element as an essential part of our AI strategy, such as for enabling quick product descriptions,” he says.
“However, we have other projects that we are working on. Each of these initiatives is an iterative experiment, where we start with small pockets of value delivery. Then, once we start delivering measurable business value, we end up making this project into a bigger service.”
Building data foundations
Beyond the realms of AI, Bharadwaj says his biggest achievement as CIO has been eliminating the silos of data held in enterprise business units.
Happy Socks migrated to the Snowflake AI Data Cloud in 2024 to help the business become more data driven. The company has built a greenfield data platform using Snowflake and a host of associated technologies, including dbt, Airbyte and Sigma.
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Before implementing the platform, the majority of the company’s reporting was completed in Excel. Bharadwaj says using Snowflake and an integrated data stack has helped inspire a step change in decision-making processes and enabled self-serve analytics.
“Our digital teams had been doing manual reporting for years,” he says. “They’d be looking at uncovering multiple data sources and putting that into an Excel spreadsheet at eight o’clock in the morning before the leadership team arrived. Now, with Snowflake, that process has become a real-time report that’s updated every 15 minutes. That, to me, is a success.”
The company continues to explore potential use cases. Some of the priority areas for the next 12 months will include predictive analytics, inventory management and personalisation, particularly for email communications with customers. Bharadwaj says the high level of visibility into information makes it much easier for people in the business to make decisions.
“When our leadership teams in sales and finance come together to look at data and inconsistencies in how they’re reporting particular numbers, the insights are just bubbled up – the information is now very easily exposed. That insight allows the teams to go further in their processes,” he says.
“Our digital teams had been doing manual reporting for years ... uncovering multiple data sources and putting that into an Excel spreadsheet. Now, with Snowflake, that process has become a real-time report that’s updated every 15 minutes. That, to me, is a success”
Vivek Bharadwaj, Happy Socks
“When we can improve decision-making speeds with better access to data, that is a direct consequence of the upside of this work and is one of our biggest successes. We still have a lot of work to do on this journey, but we like to celebrate our successes. I encourage our teams to enjoy all the little wins.”
Meeting new requirements
Bharadwaj says his team’s efforts to build a data platform will pay dividends in the longer term. While many people fixate on the potential benefits of emerging technology, CIOs must ensure that strong underlying foundations are in place.
“When I joined the company, because I have a background in data, a lot of people asked me about my plans for AI,” he says, referring to when he started working for Happy Socks.
“I said, ‘Nothing yet as I’ve got to start with the foundations’. And that has become a big motivation for me.”
Bharadwaj and his teams continue to refine their approach and are eager to ensure technologies are implemented carefully and successfully. He refers, once again, to responsible AI and the importance of checks and balances.
“One of the technology policies that I have enacted within the company is that we will not release AI apps without human guardrails,” he says. “So, a human must be in the loop if our technology team launches an app. A human needs to have the final say.”
With these guardrails in place, Bharadwaj’s team will seek out new ways to exploit AI and data. He says the general direction of travel for the technology team is to create as many insights as possible to help the business better understand its customers.
“In retail, we are seeing a commoditisation of brands, so it’s getting harder to differentiate and leave an impact on customers,” he says.
“So, a big thing for us is to be able to listen to the customer – and it’s not just when they talk, but in what they do as well, so that’s about understanding their behaviour, thinking about their requirements through insights, and tying everything together in one unified customer journey.”
In the competitive world of retailing, Happy Socks must find new ways to surprise and delight the people who buy its products. Bharadwaj says the deployment of emerging technology will help the company to react more effectively to customers’ fast-changing needs.
“These kinds of insights are a big enabler for us to be more agile,” he says. “We want to be closer to the market and deliver the right kind of products and experiences that customers are looking for.”
