Specialty Store Analytics

Predictive Analytics Solutions for Specialty Gift Retailers.

Speciality Retailers work in a fast-paced, highly seasonal environment and often offer a diverse assortment in their stores. Retalon helps maintain an optimal assortment and high In-Store Percent while simultaneously reducing inventory costs. Our predictive analytics and AI engine generate a highly accurate demand forecast that automatically generates purchase orders, as well as automatic allocation and replenishment quantities to optimize your inventory.

Our solutions take dozens of critical factors into account that affect a gift retail business such as seasonality, moving holidays, promotions, price elasticity, capacities, vendor lead times, and much more. Retalon’s platform unifies the entire retail process from planning, to inventory management, pricing, promotions, and markdowns.

Gifts Retailer Testimonial:

Retailer: The Paper Store

The Paper Store is a quickly growing gifts retailer with a highly seasonal business and a very diverse assortment mix. Retalon helps The Paper Store generate a highly accurate demand forecast and optimize their inventory to maintain a high In-Stock percent on top performing products while keeping inventory costs down.

Optimized Assortment Planning

Retalon’s plans are visual, and highly flexible. Don’t just rely on last year’s misleading sales data, Retalon’s plans are based on a highly accurate demand forecast generated by our Predictive Analytics and AI engine. All plans easily integrate into each other including Financial, Merchandise, Assortment, Store-Level, Pre-Season, In-Season, and Open-to-Buy. Retalon proactively accounts for other important factors in the business such as New Product Introductions and Promotions in Planning.

Demand Forecasting for Seasonality and Moving Holidays

Specialty gift retailing is highly seasonal, with high peaks and low valleys. Moreover, some holidays are moving holidays such as Easter that happen in different weeks each year. Retalon’s advanced predictive analytics and machine learning engine intelligently generates a highly accurate demand forecast to ensure retailers maintain a highly In-Stock percent during holidays while at the same time reducing inventory costs. The system automatically accounts for shifting holidays, one-time events, and seasonality of every store/SKU combination.

Optimizing Inventory Purchasing, Allocation, and Replenishment

Due to the nature of the gift business, purchasing decisions are often made well in advance. Moreover, there’s a strong trend toward increased localization and personalization of assortment across different stores/channels. Retalon automatically generates optimal purchase orders and builds a smart allocation and replenishment schedule to bring the right assortment to the right locations at the right time. The system continues to measure performance in real-time and optimizes inventory decisions accordingly.

Product Families, Dynamic Clusters and Event Attributes

One feature that has been tremendously successful for Retalon’s specialty gift clients is “Product Families”. Retalon intelligently groups products into clusters that can be based on occasion attributes (seasonal events). This allows for better forecast accuracy, successful events, promotions, and reduced costs to mange seasonal merchandise. The feature also accounts for product cannibalization between substitute products and improves new product introductions.

Smart End-of-Lifecycle Support & Markdown Optimization

Retalon offers a smart and easy way to manage merchandise that’s reaching its end-of-life. Many products in the gift business have short lifecycles. Sudden peaks in demand during holiday events also means sudden drops in demand after the events. Retalon’s Markdown solution identifies markdown candidates and recommends the optimal markdown strategy to get rid of merchandise by a targeted date with the highest possible return on inventory investment.

One Unified Predictive Analytics Platform

All Retalon solutions are built on one unified predictive analytics platform that can account for all influencing factors in a specialty retailer business and their interrelations. As a result, our machine learning (AI) engine builds a highly accurate and dynamic forecast and intelligently connects the planning, inventory optimization, and promotions/markdowns. Unlike function-specific solutions, Retalon’s approach provides superior accuracy, flexibility, scalability, consistently and higher ROI. Our clients typically see a significant reduction in inventory, labor and resource costs, a healthy boost in sales and turnovers.

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