Apparel

Introduction:

The Apparel Market covers clothing and fashion, fashion accessories footwear and many more. AMP2 is uniquely equipped to serve this range of products for bricks and mortar, catalog and on-line e-commerce channels. The market has consolidated over the last two decades and many groups now operate a range of different outlets to serve a wide range of customer segments and geographical areas. Today’s retail software needs to support many different go-to-market strategies. Store formats, business structures, customer differentiation, assortments, multiple retail and wholesale channels and competitor impacts must all be capable of great flexibility in a fast changing business and economic environment and where the impact of a range of discount and value clothing/fashion retailers has structurally changed the marketplace.

AMP2 is a product of its time attuned to these important needs and challenging the old silo structures where pricing, promotions, markdowns, advertising, media, loyalty, marketing and merchandise management are undertaken in different systems often without knowledge of each other’s decisions and actions. Consequently many retailers still don’t know the combined effect of all the parts of their go-to-market offer for a particular period or market. Even if they were to deploy the most advanced optimization on prices and promotions, if they haven’t brought these disparate systems and spreadsheets together in one system, they will still be operating sub-optimally.

Merchandising Philosophy:

The apparel sector has adopted a variety of methods and processes to undertake its work. Most common has been the adoption of a business philosophy to manage more commercially the marketing, merchandising, buying and selling of a retailer’s business. AMP2 helps retailers manage this business approach and makes it operational, bringing together all the many functions that make up the overall buying and selling elements of retail. These methods provide financial analysis and rigor to the buying and selling aspects of their businesses and are fully supported by AMP2,

Almost every major market has become very competitive in recent years irrespective of company size or format. This makes it necessary to rethink the methods and processes retailers are using to operate their buying and selling activities. The need to make the most of a particular market or assortment has never been greater; the frequent changing of merchandise ever more important; the need to respond to competitor activity never more necessary. The low or even negative sales growth of the last two years, brought on by the worldwide economic downturn, puts pressure on the apparel sector as disposable incomes have been squeezed. This sector above all has the critical need to keep up with fashion trends and tastes to ensure its ranges and product timings reflect what’s fashionable day-in, day-out. Retailers need to think about these consequences as we all fight even harder for each dollar or market share decimal point.

Application of Science:

Retail Express’s use of science and technology brings merchandising systems into this new decade and properly supports these philosophies with their much greater focus on analysis and evaluation with a hardnosed commercial/financial approach. This is represented in AMP2 with department, section and market P&L’s which bring together the impact of all prices, markdowns, incentives, promotions, adverts, events, promotional displays, flyers, coupons, loyalty points, kiosks, mailers etc. into a real time simulation that understands the effects of each touch point on the customer and the interaction of different touch points. Thus AMP2 presents the merchandise manager with a financial go-to-market P&L before committing to the whole proposition so that it can tuned to obtain the best results. Of course this financial impact analysis is used in conjunction with the AMP2 optimization tools to achieve the best mix of the strategic positioning on price/promotions and best execution in regard to the competition and the market/budgets in the current week/period etc.,

AMP2 is the solution where science and merchandising meet – smarter science = better results.