Data informed strategic planning: it’s something that many businesses strive for, yet few fully succeed at. Why? Because it takes more than just intent to put a plan into action, and businesses without the right tools and technologies to execute data informed strategies all too often end up putting it into the “too hard” basket.
But not these businesses.
Here, we look at three inspiring examples of data informed merchants that are executing multichannel global strategies for growth and business operational processes.
Superlove Merino, brainchild of mothers Becky Sayer, an experienced garment designer, and Suse Fletcher, a product development executive, have been wrapping up babies in ultra-soft merino wool garments since 2012.
Sayer and Fletcher originally managed the business’ inventory using spreadsheets, but soon found them to be inadequate for keeping track of up to 500 SKUs, whilst juggling retail and wholesale sales as well as manufacturers.
They selected TradeGecko after researching and trialing a number of inventory management systems. They didn’t want to hold 100 items of each variant, and TradeGecko gave them the tools to know exactly when to reorder individual variants. The team estimates that TradeGecko’s intelligent data tools save them up to 15 hours of manual work each work, which has enabled them to scale globally:
TradeGecko has allowed us to expand internationally - we now have the system and support to expand globally and start international sales.”
Brooklyn Bicycle Co. has been building quality bikes and selling them at an affordable price since 2011. The business integrates TradeGecko with Inventory Planner to forecast sales, revenue and cash flow on a quarterly or yearly basis. The majority of the company’s sales happen between March and September, and the two integrated systems allow the team to accurately forecast demand and growth while still accounting for seasonal fluctuations.
With good visibility into the months ahead from a sales and growth perspective, the business can make data informed decisions about operational processes and investments:
When I see a map of our operational processes, Tradegecko sits at the heart of it. It's such a big part of our company and it's probably the part of our business that we are most confident in.”
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Pali Hawaii Sandals were first brought to market in Hawaii in the 1980s, and entered Mainland US in the late ‘90s. In 2015, Ryan Meehan took over the Pali Hawaii Sandals from his parents and saw the need to bring the business into the 21st century. He migrated all operations to the cloud, integrating TradeGecko with Xero for accounting, ShipStation for shipping, and Inventory Planner to examine sell-through patterns.
With all his business systems connected in TradeGecko, Meehan has implemented a strategy for collecting clean data and reducing manual data entry – which has saved hundreds of man hours and reduced manual transcription errors:
The data you import into TradeGecko will ultimately emanate out into all the other services you connect to it, so take the time to get it right! Eliminate manual data entry wherever possible to reduce errors and create a system that’s repeatable and easy to use to ensure you can execute your data strategy with integrity.”
TradeGecko’s newest demand forecasting tool takes data informed decision-making to the next level by making it possible to plan and budget for future trends without having to do sift through historical sales data and create forecast reports manually.
TradeGecko’s demand forecasting tool enables you to:
