Cutting Costs, Not Style: Hypebeast Saves $3 Million Annually with Gemini Enterprise

About Hypebeast

Hypebeast is a global platform within the fashion and media industries. It combines editorial news with commerce. Hypebeast reaches audiences across North America, Europe and the Asia Pacific.

The Challenge

Hypebeast faced distinct operational challenges due to the scale of its global operations:

• Logistics Visibility: Merchandisers tracked inventory individually using isolated Excel and Google Sheets. It was difficult to identify the location of items at any given point, making stock management challenging.
• Communication and decision-making: Merchandiser communicated via email and Slack to locate stock (whether on a ship, plane, or truck), which took up to one week. Due to time zone differences, decision-making data was often hours or days out of date, resulting in missed opportunities for high-demand fashion items.
• Content Bottlenecks: Journalists spent excessive time manually processing press releases to write factual, structured articles. This administrative burden prevented them from focusing on high-value investigative journalism and opinion pieces.

The Goal

Hypebeast aimed to:

• Achieve real-time visibility into global inventory to secure sales on fast-moving stock.
• Improve communication and decision-making.
• Democratise AI, empowering non-technical staff to use infrastructure without needing programming skills.
• Automate the creation of routine news articles to maximise journalist productivity.

The Solution

Hypebeast chose Devoteam as a strategic partner to implement Gemini Enterprise (formerly Google Agentspace) and ensure a successful adoption. Using Gemini Enterprise, Hypebeast were able to address the following challenges:

• Merchandising Transformation: Devoteam’s experts first began the project by uploading Excel spreadsheets that contain real-time inventory insights into a centralised Google Drive that connects seamlessly to Hypebeast’s Gemini Enterprise instance. This synchronisation enables Hypebeast’s merchandisers to use Gemini Enterprise to interact with the inventory data by simply asking natural language questions such as, “Where is this pallet of sneakers today?” or “Is this order of socks on track for delivery?” and receive instant answers. 
• Media Automation: Devoteam assisted Hypebeast in developing an automated workflow for the editorial team. When a press release in a PDF arrives at a tracked email address, Gemini Enterprise reads the document, generates a structured article that matches Hypebeast’s brand voice, and deploys it on their website. 

The style of this implementation allowed the platform to remain flexible. It did not require a complete overhaul of user behaviour; staff could continue using the applications they are comfortable with (i.e. Excel), while the agentic AI layer handled the complex information retrieval and processing.

The Methodology

The implementation followed a methodology of user empowerment and simplification.

• Phased Adoption Strategy: Hypebeast’s teams were first introduced to the platform for simpler, high-value tasks like document search, multimodal content summarisation and email generation. This strategy allowed the wider team to realise immediate productivity gains, creating positive momentum for more concentrated use. 
• Democratisation: The strategy focused on empowering all the staff to set up their own connectors and workflows.
• Integration, not Replacement: Rather than forcing a new rigid platform, the methodology leveraged existing data repositories (Google Sheets) but unified them in a central drive to make them accessible to the AI.
• Agile Change Management: Devoteam identified high-impact, repetitive tasks (like document search or content summarisation) and applied Gemini Enterprise specifically to remove those manual barriers.

The Result

The implementation of Gemini Enterprise delivered immediate, quantifiable impacts on Hypebeast’s bottom line and operational speed.

Logistics & Supply Chain:

• Speed increased: Information retrieval time dropped from one week to seconds.
• Time saved: The solution saves approximately 60 hours per merchandiser per month across a team of 40.
• Headcount efficiency: The improved decision-making and tracking resulted in approximately 30 fewer personnel within the logistics supply chain.
• Cost reduction: These efficiencies result in financial savings of approximately $2 million – $3 million USD per year.

Journalism & Content:

• Hours reclaimed: The automated press release workflow saves 4,500 hours a year previously spent on manual writing.
• Strategic value: Journalists have shifted their focus from administrative writing to investigative journalism and opinion pieces, enhancing the quality of the publication’s output.

Curious about how Gemini Enterprise addresses other retail challenges? Read the expert-written in-depth article (featuring a demo of the platform in action!)