16/02/12
By Karen Moss
Hobbs has seen improved performance across stores after the implementation of Prologic’s fashion line merchandising solution (FLM) during 2011.
The issue of stock shortages in best performing stores is common to all fashion retailers. This results in lower rate of sale stores holding excess stock and higher levels of markdown at the end of the season.
Prologic’s FLM enables fashion retailers to fully optimise stock levels across stores, reducing range fragmentation, maximising potential for full-price sell through and minimising exposure to unnecessary stock markdown. Because FLM automates and continuously updates stock plans, Hobbs can now quickly react to sales performances of individual lines and fine-tune stock levels across its entire store and concession estate and website.
Susan Millin, merchandising director at Hobbs is delighted with the results: “FLM has significantly improved availability in our 30 best performing stores.”
Hobbs has seen a significant reduction in the amount of time spent by branch merchandising team manually potentialising store level replenishment. Millin says: “The implementation of FLM has enabled us to set parameters so that we automatically review sales and stock data for the entire range at size level each week – a situation that was not achievable with our branch merchandising resource before.”
Initial stock allocation has also improved. Millin explains: “FLM has given us the confidence to reduce our initial allocations by up to 25 per cent as we are confident that FLM will focus the replenishment onto the best selling stores for each line, based on actual performance rather than pre-set store or category gradings.” As a result Hobbs is not left with excess terminal stock, therefore, reducing its markdown spend.
“A typical FLM managed line is now available for replenishment to our top performing stores for significantly longer that it was previously,” explains Millin. “This means we maintain a credible display to the customer for longer and have a greater opportunity to achieve a higher full price sell through.”
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