Sparkshot^™

The analytics team turns raw retail data into a shared, current understanding of demand and performance that every other team builds on. It doesn't stop at charts — it surfaces the decisions hiding in your numbers.

• Demand forecasting

  Unit-level demand by style, color, size, and location — accounting for seasonality, lifecycle stage, and the pull of newness. A living forecast that re-reads as the season unfolds, not a number set once and forgotten.
• Assortment performance

  How every style, category, and cluster is really tracking against plan — sell-through, rate of sale, full-price realization, and margin — framed as what to do next, not just what happened.
• Size optimization

  The right size curve by style and cluster, so you stop selling out of the core and marking down the tails. Broken size runs get caught before they cost full-price sales.
• Newness forecasting

  Credible forecasts for items with little or no history, read across comparable styles, attributes, and launch patterns — so first receipts and reorders aren't a guess.
• Lost-sales recovery

  Quantifies the demand you never saw — lost to stockouts, the wrong store, or the wrong size — and feeds that recovered signal straight back into planning and buying.

The financial planning team builds and protects the plan — sales, margin, inventory, and turn — reconciled top-down to your targets and bottom-up to the assortment, and kept honest as actuals land.

• Merchandise financial planning

  Constructs and maintains the merchandise financial plan and keeps tops-down targets and bottoms-up detail in agreement all season long.
• Business planning

  Translates corporate and category targets into a workable merchandise plan and updates it continuously as the business reads in.
• Open-to-buy management

  Tracks and protects open-to-buy in real time, flags over- and under-bought positions, and proposes the receipt and markdown moves to bring dollars back in line.
• Scenario planning

  Model promo, supply, and demand what-ifs side by side and see the margin and inventory consequences before you commit a dollar.

The assortment team builds the line to the financial frame — choosing breadth, depth, and flow by cluster, and reconciling every option against the dollars available to spend.

• Item planning

  Plans at the item and option level — breadth, depth, and flow — so the line is built to a financial frame instead of backed into after the fact.
• Store clustering

  Groups stores by how they actually sell — volume, climate, demographics, and attribute affinity — so assortments fit local demand, not a single national plan.
• Open-to-buy reconciliation

  Keeps the assortment and the financial plan in agreement, reconciling option counts and depth against the open-to-buy available to spend.
• Cluster-level assortment

  Tailors breadth and depth to each cluster — which options each group of stores carries, and how deep to go on the winners.
• Buy planning

  Turns the assortment into a placeable buy — quantities, size curves, and delivery flow — ready to write back to your systems.

The execution team puts inventory where demand is and keeps it there — allocating, replenishing, and rebalancing continuously, and re-optimizing automatically as the season moves.

• Allocation

  Decides which units go to which stores and channels, by cluster and size curve, balancing newness, replenishment, and presentation minimums.
• Replenishment

  Keeps the right depth on the floor, auto-replenishing to demand and protecting the sizes and doors that turn — without overfeeding slow stores.
• Rebalancing

  Moves inventory to where it will actually sell, pulling from soft locations and pushing to demand, before markdown is the only lever left.
• Real-time inventory optimization

  Continuously re-optimizes positions as sales, receipts, and returns land — adjusting automatically and surfacing every move for approval.

The pricing team manages price across the whole life of the product — full-price runway, the right promotion, the right markdown — to get the most out of every unit.

• Markdown optimization

  Times and sizes markdowns to clear through on the most profitable path, by cluster and size — not a blunt chain-wide cadence.
• Promotional strategy

  Plans and evaluates promotions on true incremental margin, not just lift — so you run what pays and stop what doesn't.
• Revenue maximization across the lifecycle

  Manages price from launch to exit to capture the most value from every unit's life, lifecycle stage by lifecycle stage.