Buying Resource

The range and quality of merchandise is at the very heart of every retail business. It drives your business profile and market position, as well as generating gross margin.

Our expertise in buying and range planning comes from practical experience within a wide range of retail businesses, from new start ventures to multi-million pound national brands. We can support your buying processes at a number of levels, including:

Range Planning

Establishing the right stock structure is fundamental to budgetary control and maximising benefits from your EPOS / stock system. We have a range of techniques and tools to manage the process of building ranges from the bottom up, ensuring that buying procedures and system outputs are both usable and scalable. Once the structure is established, we will guide you through the more creative process of designing the physical product range into the plan.

Range Reviews

In a constantly changing commercial world, a business that stands still will be overtaken by its competitors. We conduct structured critical reviews of existing and planned products ranges, to ensure that your business is keeping itself ahead of the game in its market sector.

Buying and Promotional Activity

All too often we see retailers responding to seasonal periods and promotional opportunities, rather than planning ahead and trying to make things happen for themselves. Our Promotional Planner enforces the discipline of looking ahead and building business around key activity periods, and provides a framework for planning and monitoring the success of these critical trading periods.

Budgetary Control

An ill-planned buying strategy can quickly lead to major problems with excess stock and the resultant hit on gross margin. By ensuring that all business processes link together, we can help ensure that stock is properly managed, cash flow optimised and mark-downs kept to a minimum.