The accidental discovery of 'lean retail'
Summary
About a decade ago Universal Music, one of the world’s largest recorded-music distributors, realized that a small chain of record stores in Maine had a much lower return percentage than other independent retailers and a high coverage ratio. In fact, Bull Moose found that the 1993 Walt Disney movie “Hocus Pocus” has sold like hotcakes every Halloween, something none of the humans working there would have figured out on their own. Both retailers have seen sales suffer, and have changed their tune by responding to the real market — Abercrombie last year did away with a high stock of label-heavy clothes and Lululemon announced last week that it will begin offering a larger range of sizes for its althetic wear. “You have to be wrong for a shorter amount of time.” Wickard says that FieldStack applies the same approach, of systemic flow and connectivity, to all aspects of retail logistics, eliminating silos so that information can be leveraged to improve speed, discover efficiencies, or uncover hard truths. Our recommendations may mean that your shipping costs will go up 10%, but if profits go up 20%, you’ll take it.” Wickard, like many geeks, gets pretty excited when he talks about writing code, protecting the cloud with a cyber "Brinks truck," and aggregating data, but he’s a retailer at heart, too.
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