Spontaneous assortments
Pre-determined product grouping is being replaced by spontaneous & personalised looks & silhouettes. The decree of buyers & merchandisers is giving way to the empowerment of customers & influencers
I’ve been employed to help improve product assortments by Boots, AllSaints, Ferrari, Nespresso, Max&Co, Camper, Cortefiel, Sonae, Zippy, Otto Versand, La Caixa, National Geographic, Real Madrid, Gruppo Vestebene, Alessi, Portaventura, & Bialetti amongst others.
My clients like the approach which is both commercially quantitative, and creatively qualitative.
They also like the process which is highly collaborative, involving cross-functional teams, data-analysis parties, competitor benchmarking of product size & price architectures, style positioning workshops and customer focus group sessions.
Every consultancy project is created and developed for each client’s specific needs and requests. The scope, timing, resources and process is agreed after an initial discussion process.
To have a discussion about your assortment, email me at tim@retailmeaning.com
Zippy
Portugal &Spain
It has been my pleasure to work with Sonae across several of its formats including Continente, Worten, Modalfa and its childrenswear brand Zippy.
Zippy is a popular market leader in Portugal with bright & cheerful shops. The stores are on the surface full of attractive products for all ages. Perhaps a little too full.
A project that looked closely at the sales data, cross-referencing with the qualitative product styling, enhancements and creative adornments, revealed many opportunities to ensure the assortment hit all the correct price points, with all the appropriate categories, with the best possible styling.
Many assortment planning projects have begun as Visual Merchandising projects.
The fact is that display inconsistencies can often be a ‘smokescreen’ for some fundamental problems with the assortment.
These can be both quantitative, where the balance of categories makes the shop displays equally unbalanced. Or they can be qualitative where the balance of colours, or plain to pattern ratios, can deliver a shop which is nothing short of visual chaos.
Even in a childrenswear shops, control in the buying must coordinate with control in the merchandising.
There are more client project stories to discover on the Great Retailers page…
Check out assortment related posts on the Retailmeaning Blog…
To have that first discussion, email me at tim@retailmeaning.com