Merchandising and Inventory Management Services
All Inclusive Merchandising
Looking to get product selection and inventory management off your plate entirely? We offer full scale, all inclusive buying services for small retailers. Get back to what you love about retail and leave the rest to us.
Product Hierarchy Optimization
The segmentation of retail goods within your point of sale (POS) system is analyzed to ensure that sales, margin, and inventory reporting is accurate and actionable. Changes are recommended and executed as needed.
Target Customer Validation
The customer may always be right, but is every customer right for your business? Target Customer Validation identifies the customer groups that you most want to sell to so that your assortment can be focused accordingly.
Product Assortment Framework (PAF) Creation
Building on the work completed during product hierarchy optimization and target customer validation, we create an intentional “shopping list” for your preseason buying to ensure that you're meeting the needs and wants of your target customers. Get through one season with a PAF in hand and you'll never want to be without again.
Merchandise Strategy Creation
We work with you to define sales growth initiatives in the coming season. With a merchandise strategy in place, retail buying can be adapted to support those initiatives. This step is the difference between retailers that want to grow verses those that plan to grow.
Sales, Margin, and Markdown Forecasting
Top line sales forecasts that support your growth initiatives are created and then distributed down through the product hierarchy. Likewise with margin and markdowns. While optimization of the product hierarchy (see above) is not required to create forecasts, it is strongly encouraged.
Inventory Planning
Inventory planning creates a plan for the monthly flow of inventory across all levels of the product hierarchy that supports the sales goals of your business. Here again, product hierarchy optimization can be most helpful to maximize the benefit of this service.
Open To Buy (OTB) Management
Open To Buy management ensures that inventory levels support sales, either by pursuing purchasing opportunities or mitigating liabilities from excess inventory. Retailers must have a pre-existing sales, margin, markdown, and inventory plan in order for Transcend Retail to manage their OTB. There is no service offered with as much potential to impact your sales and profit.
Postseason Analysis
With management, assess the concluded season for successes and failures, opportunities and liabilities. The output of this work informs the merchandise strategy for the following season season.
Custom Services
Every retailer is unique, and every retailer's needs are too. Don't see what you're looking for from the list of services above? Let's have a conversation about how Transcend Retail can help you achieve your goals. Just click the "Learn More" button to get in touch.