Retail Merchandising
Driving customer loyalty and results
Consumers are an elusive target today, as they are more empowered and connected as ever before. With so many options available—choices in retailers, products, channels, fulfillment, prices—merchants face a virtual endless stream of moving parts to drive customer loyalty and drive financial results across their product assortment. Getting the right product to the right place at the right time at the right price has never been so complicated. To keep up with this rate of change, merchandising organizations must identify the right strategies, processes, operating models, and tools to compete successfully or risk rapid decline.
Applying art and science
Deloitte’s Retail Merchandising practice works with retail executives to assess and drive merchandising and planning performance across people, process, and technology. This includes building capabilities that will drive targeted assortments and inventory. These need to be executed while localizing to customer demand in an omnichannel environment. We apply leading practices, innovative methodologies, and analytical solutions to help drive merchandising effectiveness aligned to retailers’ customer and market strategies. With more than 150 retail practitioners, we offer depth of experience in the industry, and we can leverage the full breadth of Deloitte’s offerings to provide a full complement of services to our clients.
Retail Merchandising services
- Omni-channel Assortment Planning and Optimization — optimally planning assortments to drive sales and margin profitably, informed by broad strategies, customer insights, and assortment analytics, and enabled by efficient processes, systems, and tools.
- Omni-channel Inventory Planning and Optimization — planning inventory supply and demand across various points, including within and across borders, channels, and concepts.
- Global/Omni-channel Operating Model — driving definition and implementation of the strategic vision and blueprint for merchandising and planning across geographies, channels, and concepts.
- Merchandising Process Optimization — designing and delivering merchandising process excellence, supporting organizational needs design, and change management.
Potential bottom-line benefits
- Improve top line sales and gross margin
- Improve gross margin return on investment
- Increase inventory turns
- Reduce cycle times and speed to market
- Operate more efficiently and effectively
The use of analytics is essential if merchandising executives are to back their decision-making experience and intuition with solid facts.