Datavations is transforming how home improvement and building materials manufacturers understand the competitive market at Home Depot, Lowe's, and other major retailers. By providing SKU-level transaction data across the home improvement channel, Datavations gives manufacturers the visibility and actionable intelligence they need to walk into merchant meetings as category experts.
Their platform helps commercial teams understand how to price competitively, prepare for Product Line Reviews, and benchmark performance against competitors at the SKU level - building the data-backed arguments that influence assortment decisions and strengthen relationships with their retail partners. The results speak for themselves: one client reports winning over $120 million in incremental orders, while another boosted gross margins by 20%.
How Datavations discovered Retool
Like many data-focused companies, Datavations initially relied on Tableau for business intelligence and analytics. While Tableau excelled at visualization, the team recognized they needed something more sophisticated for their client-facing portal.
“We needed more robust role-based access control and more flexible deployment options to scale with our rapidly expanding client base and increasingly complex data integrations. That’s when we found Retool.” - Connor Hudson, Datavations
Retool offered the perfect foundation for their client portal. But in 2024, as Datavations looked to secure their Series A funding, they faced a pressing challenge: migrating existing features into Retool quickly while minimizing disruptions to clients. They needed a platform expert who could build fast, execute a seamless transition between tools, and deliver a platform that is flexible enough to scale. They needed a partner who could hit the ground running with Retool.
Enter: Bold Tech
In November 2024, Datavations partnered with Bold Tech to augment its development capabilities. Rather than simply outsourcing their Retool development work to us, Bold Tech became an advisory and supportive layer, working alongside Datavations' existing team to help accelerate development, while sharing knowledge and best practices.
Since our engagement began, Bold Tech has delivered a range of solutions within Datavations’ Retool deployment, including:
Custom multi-page navigation. Before Retool launched its multi-page app functionality, we engineered a solution to pass selected filters seamlessly between separate apps, ensuring a consistent user experience. When Retool eventually released multi-page apps, we managed the migration while preserving all existing functionality.
Advanced permissioning system. While Retool now offers built-in RBAC for multi-page apps, we developed a custom permissioning system that provides even more granularity and control. "The custom solution actually gives us capabilities beyond Retool's native implementation," David, on our dev team, notes, "so we've continued using it."
Source control integration. We implemented GitHub-based source control, enabling proper version management, code review processes, and deployment pipelines - all critical for maintaining quality in a client-facing application.
Bold Tech’s advanced knowledge of Retool's technical intricacies and secure deployment patterns kept Datavations' team moving fast, eliminating the trial-and-error that typically slows down complex implementations.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the apps we’ve helped build.
Key projects we’ve built together
Client-facing portal for data analysis and product development
The portal we built enables Datavations to deliver their market intelligence directly to manufacturers: in a centralized dashboard, clients can compare pricing across retailers, find opportunities by tracking SKU performance, identify gaps in underserved categories, and monitor competitor activity.
Instead of overwhelming users with data, the interface we built helps analytics, sales, marketing, and product teams quickly spot what matters and act on it. The app offers powerful ways to get product insights with the data, allowing for global filters across the market, as well as highly specific product ranges.
As many of Datavation’s users are non-technical, we designed the UI to be as intuitive and user-friendly as possible, keeping actions clear and simple.
Reports that convert directly to Google Slides
To build on these portal features, we also helped design an automated presentation builder that converts Retool chart components into editable Google Slides.
This presented an interesting challenge of pushing Retool beyond its typical use case and working creatively around its limitations. Rather than relying on paid third-party apps, we built a custom solution to give Datavations greater flexibility and avoid vendor lock-in.
In the end, our workflow transforms Plotly charts (using utils.serializePage) into Base64 PDF (a Retool limitation), then to Base64 image via a custom component, which is then stored in Retool Database, before uploading to Retool Storage to generate shareable image URLs that integrate directly with Google Slides.
Users can then build categorized presentations with labeled chart snapshots that automatically populate in their Google account, with organized metadata for easy reference and sharing. Pretty nifty!
Custom email alert workflow
Finally, we used Retool Workflows to build an automated alert system that monitors retail data and sends customized notifications to Datavations' clients. It replaced their manual Python scripts with scheduled workflows that track new products, price changes, and category updates across retailers like Home Depot.
The system generates a table with HTML to give users a quick glance at the data while also providing a downloadable CSV for them to quickly work on.
Results and impact
Together, we've helped Datavations ship features faster, maintain platform stability, and strengthen security around sensitive market data, all while building their team's internal Retool expertise.
Along the way, we've pushed the boundaries of what Retool can do, solving problems that didn't have obvious solutions.
“Bold Tech is a very important development partner to our organization - they aren’t just shipping features, they collaborate with our team to build solutions together and have helped us develop some of our most important features.” - Connor Hudson, Datavations
What’s next
Datavations continues to grow, and so does our partnership - whether that's optimizing performance, building new analytical tools, or scaling infrastructure to support an expanding client base. It's a strong example of what is possible when the right technical partner helps you move fast without compromising quality.
For companies building complex applications on Retool, the Datavations story offers a clear lesson: sometimes the fastest path to scale isn't always a larger team, it’s the right partner, one who delivers today while setting you up for tomorrow.
