Merchandise analyst

What it drafts

The merchandise brief, once a week, and answers to head office's questions about stock and sales. The brief covers:

• which attributes sell ahead of their stock and which behind: silhouette, fabric, colour, occasion, metal, stone and the rest of each product's tags;
• size curves and broken sizes, store by store;
• weeks of cover, ageing, and old or dead stock;
• suggested transfers between stores, then reorders;
• markdown candidates, each with its tier and the reasons a markdown may not be the answer;
• returns by attribute and reason;
• what shoppers asked for and tried that the range barely carries.

Every figure comes from a read in that run, for a named window (the last 28 days unless asked otherwise), and every suggestion carries its evidence beside it.

Where its figures come from

Your stores' own till sales, returns and stock received. Head office imports them as a CSV file, or your POS or ERP pushes them to a signed endpoint. If a store has no till sales in the window, the brief says so and asks for the import or the push before the next one. It never fills the gap with kiosk figures.

Before it trusts an attribute, it checks how many products carry it. An attribute few products carry is marked thin and is never called a winner or a loser.

What it reads

Stores, the catalogue and how many products carry each attribute, attribute performance, size curves, stock health, suggested stock moves, markdown candidates, returns by attribute, demand by attribute, store clusters (on the first Monday of the month), demand gaps, best sellers, fit signals, your knowledge base and its memory.

Rules it keeps

• It never moves stock, places an order, changes a price, edits a product or writes to a store's till or stock system.
• It never suggests a markdown depth or a price. Head office sets the price.
• Before a markdown, it reads the candidate's notes: tried and not bought, broken sizes or a fit signal point to a fix that keeps the price.
• No forecasts: it never says what next week's sales will be.
• It never makes a statement about one shopper, or about store staff by name, and never sends the brief outside your workspace.