- For the 4th consecutive year, Nextail has been recognized as a Representative Vendor in this Market Guide.
MADRID – Nextail, the merchandise planning and execution platform for fashion, has been named as a Representative Vendor in the Gartner Market Guide for Retail Assortment Management Applications (RAMA): Short Life cycle Products for the 4th consecutive year.
According to the Gartner report, authored by Analyst Jonathan Kutner, “RAMAs use AI, predictive analytics, algorithms and optimization capabilities to plan and manage every aspect of assortment planning (i.e. preseason, in-season, product selection, channel and store distribution models) for short life cycle products such as fashion, apparel, footwear, accessories and homeware. These technologies improve how buyers and merchandisers select products into the assortment, and ease seasonal planning throughout the entire merchandise life cycle.”
Retailers of short life cycle products such as fashion, apparel, footwear, accessories and homeware, face the ongoing challenge of offering curated assortments that align with merchandise financial plans and reduce product waste. However even Tier 1 retailers continue to struggle with unscalable, inflexible and manual spreadsheet systems, or to roll out complex homegrown solutions without the required resources or specialized data science talent.
Additionally, Gartner predicts that “assortment planning will be revolutionized by the seismic shift of merchandising processes away from traditional product hierarchies and toward customer insights”. Thus, AI-led customer behavior segmentation capabilities will be critical to this transformation which depends on mining of customer data and identifying core customer groups based on preferences, demographics and buying trends.
Thus, RAMA solutions are essential for modernizing merchandising processes as part of a digital transformation strategy in unified retail commerce because they help merchandisers achieve the goal of intelligent curation of assortments. In fact, Gartner research on live RAMA implementations and use cases within Tier 1 retailers has demonstrated various key performance indicators. There have been performance improvements of short life cycle products such as a 3.3% increase in sales value, a 2.8% increase in gross profit, and a 4.8% increase in gross margin.
As per the report, retailers of short life cycle products “Invest in best-of-breed tech providers of RAMAs that enable merchandisers to leverage customer data and build assortments in line with customer-behavioral segmentation”, and “seek out technology vendors that employ teams of well-trained data scientists, developers and programmers dedicated to building highly sophisticated AI solutions as well as roadmaps for innovative enhancements.”
Nextail offers fashion-specific, AI-driven demand forecasting and automation that connect assortment planning, buying and in-season inventory decisions to ongoing demand at the most granular level. By applying these solutions across all points of sale, Nextail enables fashion retailers worldwide to curate hyper-local assortments, reducing overbuys, overstocks and markdowns, and promoting more sustainable, long-term operations.
Joaquin Villalba, Founder of Nextail, commented, “The fashion retail sector has been a force for global change since the Industrial Revolution, when machines first automated the manual production of cotton. Today, with its constant introduction of new products, short product life cycles, large data sets, and intense competition, this industry is uniquely positioned to lead the automation of enterprise decision-making at scale.”
Villalba continued, “We believe that being recognized for the 4th time in the Gartner Market Guide for Retail Assortment Management Applications: Short Life Cycle Products reinforces our commitment to empowering fashion retailers worldwide to curate targeted assortments that align with customer values, enhance sales and profit margins, and significantly reduce markdowns and waste.”
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Download the Gartner Market Guide for Retail Assortment Management Applications (RAMA)*: Short Life Cycle Products (Gartner subscription required).
Learn more about the Nextail retail merchandise planning and execution platform and solutions for fashion retailers.
