Author: Chad Symens

You Can Have Your Retail Cake and Eat it Too

Posted on December 7, 2017 by Chad Symens - Blog

As retailers strive to create experiences for their customers in their brick and mortar stores, providing an eating outlet is becoming more and more the norm. The concept is not old: Macy’s opened its first restaurant inside a department store back in 1907. Nordstrom has cafes in all of its stores, and have now expanded the concept to “hubs” with a café, nail salons and personal shoppers. Wal-Mart has McDonald’s and Target has Starbucks and food courts. Whole Foods has always had a restaurant inside their stores. Retailers are watching their holiday traffic patterns as they decide what to offer in their stores next. October retail store traffic was down, as was restaurant traffic. The next possible phase for restaurants in retail? Using the food to reflect the branding of the retailer and make “Instagramable”, attractive and unique food items to promote the social media experience. Outdoor malls that are part of master planned residential communities are incorporating living, eating and shopping as an all-in-1 experience, allowing customers to eat, take their beverage out into the mall and shop while hearing live entertainment, making it a social experience.

Sources: fool.com, patch.com

Accelerated Analytics Beauty Customers Make the Allure “19 Best Holiday Gift Ideas for the Beauty Obsessed in 2017” List

Posted on December 5, 2017 by Chad Symens - Beauty, Blog

Allure Magazine kicked off the holiday season by announcing its top 19 beauty gift ideas. Out of the thousands of possible gifts, many standouts are products from Accelerated Analytics beauty customers. These brands utilize the sales and inventory reports provided by Accelerated to drive their business through their retail accounts and manage the day to day sales and goals that are so prevalent and critical within beauty industry sales, especially during the peak holiday season, which accounted for double-digit sales for the category the past two Decembers. Deloitte US’s holiday survey reported that the number of consumers who plan to buy beauty products this holiday will grow from 18% to 29%. So, which of our customers made the list?

Estee Lauder’s MAC snowball false eyelashes dotted with roots of gold glitter
L’Oreal’s Urban Decay Naked Vault Vol IV ultimate makeup palette
Beautyblender Blender for All Seasons egg-shaped, revolutionary makeup sponge
T3 Micro’s Whirl Trio Interchangeable Styling Wand – this also won Allure’s Best of Beauty of the Year prize!

2017: Year of the Retail Apocalypse

Posted on November 28, 2017 by Chad Symens - Blog

The year 2017 is being talked about as the “year of the retail apocalypse”. Over 3000 companies have filed for bankruptcy, and 20 big retailers have or are about to close hundreds of brick and mortar stores in the US. With the big holiday weekend of Thanksgiving/Black Friday and Cyber Monday behind us, consumers are proving that online shopping will continue to prevail, and retailers are making adjustments to focusing on digital platforms, while still trying to entice shoppers into their remaining stores. Being a big toy buying season, the announcement of Toys R Us’ bankruptcy filing is taking center stage, but the retailer maintains it will keep its 1,600 stores open. Amazon won the weekend with sales with 13 million transactions in just the first two days. They were followed by WalMart, Best Buy, Target and Kohl’s.

Amid the gloom, some retailers are still seeing success, and as many retailers shrink, other new retailers are making their way into brick and mortar to take their place. Perhaps rather than an “apocalypse’ retail is seeing an “evolution”.

Sources: Fox Business, Chain Store Age

How is Holiday Shopping Season Going for Retailers?

Posted on November 27, 2017 by Chad Symens - Blog

The National Retail Federation (NRF) predicts this year’s holiday retail sales to increase by 3-4% over last year, which saw sales reach $655.8 billion. The holiday season of Thanksgiving/Black Friday and Cyber Monday through Christmas accounts for 30-40% of total retail sales for the year. Retail expert Jan Kniffen told CNBC this weekend that online retail sales should grow another 20% this year. Traffic in malls was down 9% over the weekend, and many shoppers tended to showroom, looking at products live in the stores, but then ordering online for a better deal. Economist Diane Swonk also reported to the news network’s “Trading Nation” that millennials are continuing to harm brick and mortar retail stores by increasing online shopping, which she predicts will hit 50% of retail sales soon. The NRF reports those young shoppers are spending their money on apparel, electronics, books, music and video games. Home improvement retail still is going strong in stores, though, as they are investing in DIY projects for repairs and remodeling. Those DIY items tend to need in-store experiences to look at the products before buying them.

Source: CNBC.com

Walmart Announces Huge Wins in Q3

Posted on November 20, 2017 by Chad Symens - Blog

Walmart announced its third quarter results, which exceeded economic estimates. They reported online sales growth of 50%, and total revenue rising 4.2% to $123.2 billion, versus estimates of $121 billion. Walmart US rose to $77.7 billion, and same store growth over last year increased 2.7%, which was Walmart’s 13^th consecutive quarterly increase. Based on Q3’s success, the retailer increased its annual earnings expectations. Walmart continues to unveil strategies to compete against Amazon. Last week it announced that it was partnering with Lord & Taylor to bring an online fashion store to Walmart.com. They are also building strong relationships with brands such as KitchenAid and Bose. As they head into holiday selling, they are focused on their automation of inventory checking and offering same and next-day delivery.

Sources: Chain Store Age, Business Insider

Clarins, Coty and L’Oreal Launch the Responsible Beauty Initiative

Posted on November 17, 2017 by Chad Symens - Beauty, Blog

Four leaders in the beauty industry – Clarins, Coty, Groupe Rocher, L’Oréal -, and EcoVadis, the leader in supply chain sustainability ratings, announced the launch of Responsible Beauty Initiative (RBI) earlier this week. The vision of Responsible Beauty Initiative is a global beauty industry where all suppliers have in place good ethical, social, environmental and business practices.

The Responsible Beauty Initiative brings together the global beauty industry in a collaborative effort to strengthen sustainable practices, improve environmental footprint and social impacts, and maximize shared value across its collective supply chain.

It will amplify members’ efforts to boost sustainability in their supply chains, while ensuring the suppliers of the industry have sound ethical, social, and environmental business practices in place. The RBI will achieve these objectives by:

driving a common understanding of sustainability performance across the industry
sharing best practices and processes
leveraging common tools to create efficiencies and benefits for suppliers

The Responsible Beauty Initiative is built on a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) rating platform, operated by EcoVadis, as a common foundation for supplier assessment and interaction.

The Responsible Beauty Initiative will address the unique opportunities and challenges of the beauty industry global supply chains and will aim to drive the continuous improvement of sustainability practices. The founding members will sign the charter to officially launch RBI and invite other companies and suppliers in the industry to join.

Accelerated Analytics is a comprehensive software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution for collecting, analyzing, and reporting on retail EDI 852, POS, and supply chain data. We applaud customers Clarins, Coty and L’Oreal for being founding members of the Responsible Beauty Initiative.

Accelerated Analytics Customers Outperform Home Depot LY/TY Comps Again

Posted on November 17, 2017 by Chad Symens - Blog

Accelerated Analytics customers who sell their products at The Home Depot saw their third quarter comp sales increase 9.2% over last year! That surpasses the results reported by The Home Depot in their recently released third quarter results. In a blog post on November 15th, we shared The Home Depot’s Q3 results which included reported sales of $25.0 billion, and comparable store sales for the third quarter of fiscal 2017 of positive 7.9 percent.

DIY, Home and Hardware vendors count on Accelerated Analytics to provide an expert reporting solution that empowers their sales, marketing and store operations teams. Our product and store level analytics provides the insights needed to exceed sales goals, increase orders to fully stock their shelves, test plan-o-gram efficiencies, and prepare for line reviews.

Our customers truly are winning at retail because we understand the home improvement retail business inside and out and provide a solution that is specifically targeted to, and designed for, a DIY vendor.

The Battle of the Black Friday Ads Has Begun!

Posted on November 13, 2017 by Chad Symens - Blog

While it has been reported by numerous outlets that more people will shop on Cyber Monday versus Black Friday (51% compared to 38%), retailers are still quick to get their printed Black Friday circulars out. Lowe’s released their ad, announcing they will remain closed on Thanksgiving day, but will open at 6am on Black Friday. Prices in the ad are good until November 29, and the deals are available online with free shipping. Target also announced it would be closed on Thanksgiving day, but will be open Thanksgiving night from 6pm to midnight, and also offers free shipping on everything. BestBlackFriday.com lists several of the retailers’ Black Friday ads, even leaking them a little early. The web site predicts that consumer spending online on Black Friday will increase 5.39% over 2016, with sales topping $3.52 billion. While many retailers will ship free with no minimum spending requirement, the average order size to get free shipping across all retailers will be $35. Black Friday discounts are expected to average 36.5%. Amazon’s average discount is expected to be 20-25%, while Walmart and Target are expected to discount 25-35%. Shoppers should be ready to shop online as early as Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, when many of the deals become available.

Sources: BestBlackFriday.com, chron.com

WalMart Goes After Amazon This Holiday Season

Posted on November 2, 2017 by Chad Symens - Blog

WalMart announced a series of holiday-time strategies on Wednesday, primarily focused on battling the threat of Amazon taking away from their sales. Their holiday strategy includes three themed parties between now and December 16, across 7,000 stores, for a total of 20,000 in-store parties. The parties will give shoppers the opportunity to play with toys, take pictures with Santa, see product demonstrations and taste goods. In the stores, WalMart will have extra staff on hand to assist with checkout and grab additional items for shoppers. In addition, the retailer has also tripled its inventory and expanded its assortment of brands. WalMart will also offer price rollbacks on thousands of items.

As far as online strategies, WalMart is offering more than 2 million items with free 2-day shipping on orders over $35. Also new is a “pickup discount” when shoppers order online and pick up in store. They have also doubled their grocery pick up locations, where they bring the groceries out to the customers’ cars.

WalMart is also going after Amazon’s helm as the low-price leader. A study was released this week showing that Amazon’s prices are typically 11% lower than WalMart, Target and Jet, but WalMart is closing in, being only 3% higher than Amazon across all products . The retailer is especially price competitive with Amazon in the beauty category, with products being 1% lower than Amazon on average. Experts state that going into the holiday season, the price war will continue to heat up across all of the categories of products WalMart sells.

Source: Chain Store Age

Retail Should Have a Holly Jolly Holiday Season

Posted on October 30, 2017 by Chad Symens - Blog

The National Retail Federation (NRF) annual holiday spending survey results were released, with a promising outlook for the holiday retail spending season. Consumers surveyed reported they expect to spend an average of $967.13 this year, up 3.4% from last year. Online shopping was listed by consumers as the #1 shopping destination for the first time ever, listed so by 59% of those surveyed. The NRF also noted it expects retail sales in November and December to be up by almost 4% over last year, for a total between $678 billion and $682 billion.

The survey also reports that gift cards remain the #1 popular item on wish lists. This is followed by clothing and accessories at 55%, which is the highest level that category has seen in over a decade. Other popular categories include consumer electronics at 33%, home décor at 24% and home improvement items at 18%. While 59% will shop online, 57% say they will shop at a department store, 54% at a discount store and 35% at a clothing or accessories store.

The survey showed that with regard to holiday spending only 27% are concerned about the impact of the nation’s economy, which is down 32% from last year.