Case Study: Big Cartel builds a unified, observable data platform with Dagster

Big Cartel builds a modern data platform in 6 months with Dagster Labs

Big Cartel, an e-commerce platform for artists and small businesses, faced significant data challenges. Their data was fragmented across siloed systems with no central organization, relying on unstandardized scripts and cron jobs. This led to zero observability, inconsistent business metrics, and no foundation for advanced analytics. To address this, the data engineering team of one turned to Dagster to build a modern data platform.

By implementing Dagster as its core orchestration tool, Big Cartel created a unified data control plane. The solution integrated with their tech stack, including Airbyte and dbt, and provided comprehensive observability through a centralized "Data Firehose" in Slack. Within six months, Dagster enabled proactive monitoring, eliminated inconsistent metrics, and built a scalable foundation for future customer-facing data products, significantly improving data reliability and trust.

Big Cartel