Why Can't I Find My Favorite Style in the Right Size?

Living in Milan, I am blessed with boundless shopping opportunities every day. As someone who loves shopping for shoes and clothes, I am the type of customer who constantly seeks fresh designs, styles and colors — all while keeping the brand's signature aesthetic in mind.

Whilst I often come home happy and with an armful of beautiful bags, I have a persisting question in my head: why can't I find my favorite style in the right size?

This is an understandable reality during sale periods, but it can be disappointing during beginnings and peaks of a season. In crucial times like these, retailers risk their brand reputation by falling short of customer expectations.

There are multiple factors related to such challenges retailers face today. In the post-COVID omnichannel world, it has become much harder for retailers to attend to the needs of brick-and-mortar customers like me. Today's “digital-first” customer experience brought upon new strains like faster fashion, shorter seasons and tighter margins.

Historically, retailers have concentrated primarily on filling their retail space with offers for sale. Nowadays, stores are being reimagined as spaces for experiential, clienteling, returns and information purposes. BOPIS (Buy Online, Pickup In Store) purchases and customer returns have also become increasingly prevalent activities in inventory management.

These complex and industry-defining challenges have split apparel retailers’ focus across different channels; and they need to respond appropriately to the changing market and inventory conditions to minimize markdowns and maximize their bottomline.

The good news? Aptean Retail Planning can provide the solution for retailers’ current challenges.

Aptean Retail Planning can create precise assortment plans and distribution strategies by integrating modern technologies with their 20+ years of expertise. By ensuring that the in-store and online product mix meets the requirements of each location, it can create an optimal customer experience. This is achieved by determining the right product delivery, in-store date, and buy quantity for each SKU.

With this combination, Aptean Planning is the ideal solution for retailers who want to offer a tailored shopping experience to customers like me, who want to find the ideal style and feel unique.

Aptean Planning can help satisfy what customers want in 4 steps!

Step 1: Identifying store groups with the type of customers they usually have. Whether I'm a student looking for low prices in a university area, or someone with more spending power shopping in the Milan fashion district, retailers can smartly differentiate the offer with store clustering and grading solution that addresses local customer needs.

Step 2: Getting the right mix of choices by optimizing your variety of styles and price points. Aptean Planning provides an assortment strategy by using advanced analytics to suggest the optimal number of choices to balance customer desires while maintaining reasonable profit and inventory margins. This allows you to concentrate more on balancing the assortment to ensure that every color, fit, material and price range is available.

Step 3: Selection and Distribution automatically predicts customer preferences even when the products are new. By considering affinity, price and historic similarity, Aptean Retail Planning curates a selection and distributes them to the store clusters efficiently. Finally, buying and initial allocation Units are suggested by machine learning forecasting algorithms using localized size profile, differentiated by geography, market and product attributes.

Step 4: Automatic Allocation and Replenishment ensures consistency between planning the perfect customer experience and executing that strategy. This is made possible by optimizing the manufactured intake and providing the correct, timely packing instructions to the distribution center that delivers to the store. This is where it gets overwhelming for retailers with millions of datapoints to look at.

Thankfully, machine learning can help with predicted demand driving the store replenishment, managing store transfers to extend the shelf life of all options and maximizing the availability of each variation in the store.

Despite the increasingly digital nature of fashion retail, there are still plenty of us who find joy in shopping at the old brick-and-mortar. And shoppers like you and I will always look forward to finding the perfect styles and sizes in our favorite stores.

If you’re a fashion retailer yourself and you want to perfect omnichannel fulfillment for your business, you can visit our website and learn more about Aptean Retail Planning.