Currently, there is a $210 billion disconnect between what consumers want to buy and what retailers have in stores. This inventory distortion reflects a severe misalignment within the retail industry, but, even more disturbingly, it also reveals the harrowing impact inventory stocking practices have on our environment. As retailers attempt to align stock with potential demand, many find themselves with substantial inventory pile-ups due to overstocking stores, eventually lending towards unwanted markdowns or wasted inventories. In fact, every year retailers produce over 150 billio ..read more

Read the latest article by Retail Touchpoints, featuring Andrea Morgan-Vandome, CMO of Celect, to learn how retailers are taking a page from Amazon's own playbook and using their store network as one unified distribution center to achieve massive margin gains.  While few things remain constant in retail, the customer always comes first. And in today’s Amazon Prime world, customers demand faster, cheaper and more convenient fulfillment options than ever before. Retailers are scrambling to keep pace, offering everything from pre-selected delivery slots and buy online, pick up-in-stor ..read more

“Seventy-seven percent of the retailers surveyed have deployed or have plans to deploy AI for retail strategy. Of those, 92% are targeting AI-based primary merchandising processes for implementation by 2021.” – Robert Hetu, Gartner Gartner’s latest report delves into important key priorities for retail CIOs to consider when transitioning to AI technology. According to a recent Gartner report, What Retail CIOs Need to Know About AI for Merchandising, retailers are shifting their operational focus towards automation and customer centricity with the adoption of AI. However, as retai ..read more

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of attending the 2019 Lead Innovation Summit, an event where the entire fashion and retail innovation community converges to explore what comes next for the industry. This flagship event, hosted by The Lead (a research firm focused at the crux of where fashion, retail and technology markets converge), aims to bring together brands and retailers, digital natives, recognized tech start-ups, analysts, real estate operators, enterprise tech leaders, creatives, and academics to discuss some of the most pressing topics around how innovation is shifting ..read more

We have some exciting news to share! Lucky Brand was recently recognized as an Apparel 2019 Top Innovator because of their work with Celect. This annual award, sponsored by Apparel Magazine, recognizes apparel retailers, brands, and manufacturers who demonstrate notable innovation in their business, as well as the strategic partners that foster such success ..read more

Read the latest Total Retail article by Andrea Morgan-Vandome, CMO of Celect, to learn how retailers crack the "last mile" supply chain challenge using Celect advanced analytics and optimization technologies to connect the dots between available data points and provide real-time context on what, when, where and how much customers will buy. As Amazon.com rewrites the rules of retail, retailers are struggling to adapt and stay relevant. And it’s only getting harder to compete as the online retail giant continues to up the ante — most recently introducing one-day free shipping to Amaz ..read more

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of attending the Supply Chain Council: Inventory Optimization event hosted by Coresight Research in New York City. I was joined by a combination of retailers, consultants, and other retail industry professionals to discuss the pressing problems in retail around optimizing inventory. Retailers make hundreds of thousands of inventory decisions everyday around what to buy, where to place, and where to fulfill merchandise from− and these decisions are becoming much more difficult to get right as consumer expectations change. As such, retailers are u ..read more

Consumers continue to change the way they shop (buy anywhere, receive anywhere, and return anywhere), which has had a profound impact on how inventory decisions are made. Get it right, you sell more. Get it wrong, you lose sales ..read more

I’ve spent my entire career in the retail industry, in various roles, both working directly for retailers and as a consultant. These experiences gave me an opportunity to view the retail industry through a number of different lenses. As a result, I’m often asked what is on a retail CEO’s mind in today’s current business climate, to which I typically answer, with certainty, one thing: inventory. Inventory optimization, inventory effectiveness, how to improve inventory decisions in an omni-channel world. Inventory remains the top challenge for most retailers, as seen from the $1.4 tr ..read more

The importance of solving the retail inventory challenges around out-of-stocks and excessive markdowns is compounded by the recent announcement of Amazon’s plan to sweeten delivery perks for Prime members with 1-day free shipping. Retailers need to take advantage of the store portfolio in order to compete, but in doing so they also need to make sure they’re optimizing the use of their inventory. This means making smarter inventory decisions around buying, placement of inventory and where to fulfill online orders from. The good news? With the advanced technology available today, this ..read more