Want to Improve New Product Hit Rates? You Can.
Catalog merchandising teams thrive on creativity and want nothing more than to engage in new-product introductions 24/7. Your catalog merchandising strategy and business growth depends on product innovation. When product leaders are buried in spreadsheets and can’t innovate, it’s hard on your catalog merchandising team and your business.
There’s another challenge: new product hit rates have suffered in recent years. Rising paper and postage costs, supply chain challenges, and a fierce marketplace make for high stakes. It’s tougher than ever to develop new products that grab catalog customer attention and the profitable sales your business needs.
Before You Can Tackle New Product Hit Rates, You’ve Got To Sell What’s On the Shelves
We’re direct merchants ourselves. When it comes to the challenges of merchandise assortment strategy, we get it. Before you can innovate, you have to sell through current inventory, and do it profitably. Success generates the cash you need to create new products and drive new levels of growth. Shrewd data analysis can’t be sidestepped.
It’s a vicious circle. Product teams are buried in spreadsheets, analyzing myriad data points on each item. Without one single unifying metric everyone in the organization can use, hidden gems in the assortment get missed. Clues about the best new product opportunities get missed, too.
What’s worse, subjectivity and variation from merchant to merchant about which data points they prioritize makes the goal of creating one unified merchandising strategy across titles, and across the organization, nearly impossible.
Not surprisingly, lackluster revenue and profit persists, teams stay buried in spreadsheets and safe choices that don’t yield the results your business needs, and the few new products you have time to produce fall short of expectations.
Whether you are refreshing top-sellers already in your merchandising offering, or want to improve your success rate with new, innovative products, the time for a better, more strategic merchandising planning solution has come.
New Merchandising Planning Tool Drives Better Product Decisions in Less Time
Leading multi-title catalog mailers have found amazing success in recent years with a merchandise planning tool called AssortmentGURU. This data-driven assortment optimization tool uses the power of machine learning to expedite product decisions.
Catalog brands who’ve used AssortmentGURU to drive product decisions drive better, more strategic product decisions, faster, with less spreadsheet slog, AND generate more incremental profit from existing product offerings.
Better results and cutting product team analysis time by 33% frees up precious merchandising talent to do what they do best: develop new products. Those new products succeeded at better rates with the help of AssortmentGURU’s guidance on which products would most likely be hits.
AssortmentGURU by IMS is an assortment-optimization software tool developed the industry’s most experienced data scientists and catalog merchandisers who have been through the pain and frustration you’re experiencing right now.
As catalog industry veterans, AssortmentGURU did the hard work for you and learned from it all, so you don’t have to waste time fumbling or making the same mistakes.
A Catalog Merchandising Strategy Solution Born to Solve A Common Assortment Optimization Problem
When the idea for this solution started, the multi-title catalogers behind AssortmentGURU’s development were in trouble, much like many catalogers these days. They saw a decline in new product hit rates on new products among their catalog industry clients. Sluggish revenue and profit results in their product offerings was a critical issue, too. Product teams were spending all their time buried in spreadsheets versus innovating, which just made things worse.
The IMS team collaborated with their catalog clients to build a data-driven assortment optimization solution that can work for you, too.
It took money, time and talent to build, test, prove and perfect, but the idea behind AssortmentGURU was simple. Let machines grind data. Make it easy for people to digest and use, and free up people to do what they do best: create.
How a Single Score Per Product Leads to Better Product Assortment Decision Making and Better Hit Rates on New Products, Too
Mounds of data points and spreadsheets make clear product decision-making nearly impossible. AssortmentGURU changed all that.
Using the power of machine learning and powerful data analytics, the data scientists behind AssortmentGURU created a “super score” for each product, each season that distilled myriad data points into one standard score.
The single-score approach was a game-changer. Now, every member of the merchandising team had one common language and score for understanding clear winners, clear losers and those hidden-gem products on the margins that, with some tweaking, could become shining stars.
It became possible for multiple product teams across categories and titles to have one unified merchandising planning approach, and spend far less time on item-by-item analysis.
Merchandising Strategy Success Compels Product Leaders To Make the Switch to AssortmentGURU
What blew AssortmentGURU’s developers and their clients away were the results reported by merchandising teams who used AssortmentGURU for product assortment decision making.
- Slashed analysis time by 33%
- Gained 2-2.5 points in contribution margin
- 12% of product decisions by AssortmentGURU differed from what teams would have recommended on their own, proving the difference
- Easier to drive one unified merchandising strategy across the organization
- Gained millions in incremental profit for a single client in one year when used across titles and categories
- Improved hit rates on new products
Instead of relying on gut feelings about which products will work and which won’t, teams using AssortmentGURU looked at the data, because data-driven solutions provide insight.
This improved new-product hit rates and reduces the time it takes to analyze the current product assortment.
Proven Product Assortment Strategy Solutions with AssortmentGURU
To learn more about how AssortmentGURU could work to drive results for your catalog merchandising team, book a demo today. By next season, your product team could be telling a much better story with better new product hit rates, incremental profit gains and a clear path forward for your merchandising strategy.