Buying & Merchandising

We implement 'best in class' buying and merchandising, reducing stock and markdown, and increasing sales and margin.

Our experienced team works with retailers to improve buying and merchandising in all channels by:

Improving B&M processes, implementing effective product lifecycle and category management
Improving forecast accuracy; promotion management; stock management
Designing the right B&M organisation
Integrating store and online merchandising
Designing and implementing KPIs, daily, weekly and period reports
Selling more through local range and space optimisation
Selecting and implementing effective product information management (PIM) and digital asset management
Selecting buying and merchandising systems
Project management and implementation

If you would like a copy of our white paper on stock reduction, please email Will Treasure.

Please contact Will Treasure or call +44 (0)20 7961 3200 to discuss your requirements.

Case Study
Pets at Home

Local Range and Space

Pets at Home has a wide range of store sizes, ranging from 2k sq ft to 18k sq ft. Getting the right range in each store is a challenging task, and Pets at Home requested Javelin Group to develop a local range and space approach. To this end we:

Ensured that all stores had up to date and accurate space allocation data
Built a store database, with sales, profit, space, customer demographics and location data
Clustered the stores into 5 types; Urban/High Density; Towns/Suburbs; Rural/Low Density; Large Rural; Upmarket Rural
Modelled ideal space allocation by sub-category at store level, using space elasticity and adjacencies
Used simple business rules to make the space allocation recommendations practical
Tested recommendations in eight stores
Rolled out to the whole estate

In the year following full implementation, Pets at Home LFL sales grew by 10% of which a significant amount was due to local range and space changes.

"Javelin Group's space modelling work is delivering 3-4% like for like sales growth in our trial stores. We are now rolling it out across our 200 store estate."

John Farrell, Group Development Director, Pets at Home.

Case Study
American Golf

Stock Reduction

American Golf has over 90 stores throughout the UK, selling golf equipment and clothing. Javelin Group was asked to review the stock position, and to recommend a detailed approach to reduce it. This involved:

Understanding root causes and main components of excess stock
Defining changes to buying and merchandising processes, team and systems to address the issues
Quantifying stock benefits of the recommendations
Developing a plan to implement the recommendations
Supporting the implementation

The recommendations were in three main areas:

Range planning and store grading
In season stock management
DC stock management

As a result of this work overall stock levels fell by 20%, and both availability and like for like sales increased.

"Javelin Group quickly identified a significant stock reduction opportunity and gave us clear guidelines for how this could be achieved. I am very pleased with the outcome of the project."

Nick Wood, CEO, American Golf.

Clients

"Direct Wines has been unhappy with how we buy, merchandise and market wine for some years. As the business has got bigger, it has developed an increasingly complicated way of working. That complication has, in the last three years, been exacerbated by launching the business in the US, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Germany and Australia. With more markets on the horizon the time had come to address this area. We asked Javelin Group to help spec and manage a buying and merchandising project to identify how a different approach to our wine range, our merchandising of those wines and our marketing of wine could make life simpler. Chris and the team did an excellent job of disentangling the whole area and helping us to identify a much more rigorous way of work with better hand offs between departments. He also showed us how many benefits could be derived even prior to implementing any new system for managing buying and merchandising. Together with his team, he helped us to identify what software was available and suitable to integrate with our other systems to ensure that we moved towards a much more robust and systemised way of working. We were very pleased with Javelin's insight, empathy, tenacity and recommendations. Now we just have to get on and implement their blue print."

Simon McMurtrie, Group Chief Executive, Direct Wines.

"Damart is a multi-channel clothing retailer, operating across three countries: France, Belgium and the UK. We decided to centralise our design, buying and photography to provide one international collection which individual countries and channels can select from, and we asked Javelin Group to help us with the process and critical path design, the new organisation structure, roles and responsibilities, and the technology enablers. They worked with us, in French and English, and delivered an outstanding piece of work, which we are delighted with. We then engaged them to manage the implementation, a major change programme impacting the core of our business. They organised the programme team, worked with the steering group to implement the new critical path processes, and helped us with the people aspects of change management. This "new vision" programme has been very successful, delivering the benefits we wanted, and I’m very pleased with Javelin Group's work. I highly recommend them."

Jacques Destobbeleer, International Director of Product Offer, Damart Group.

"Javelin Group did a great job of recommending how to reduce our lead times, improve stock turn, and improve sales per square foot through better processes and systems across our B&M operation. Their plans will clearly have a significant positive impact on our retail performance. I am very happy to recommend them."

Vanessa Gold, B&M Director, Ann Summers.

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