Oakley Gets into Focus

[freemexy]

Oakley Gets into Focus
Most consumers know Oakley primarily for its high-performance sport sunglasses, but the company also manufactures men’s and women’s apparel, footwear, goggles, headwear and other gear for sports enthusiasts who want to push their experiences to the limit. With innovative products for skiing, snowboarding, surfing, cycling and BMX, the California-based company is constantly looking for new ways to infuse technology into the activewear it provides, while investing in intelligent solutions to help drive the performance of its expansive network of retailers.

When one retailer requested to return more than $100,000 worth of typically popular cheap Oakleys merchandise due to lagging sales, the team at Oakley thought something sounded off. They believed there was more to the story than what met the retailer’s eye, but the retailer wasn’t able to provide the insight needed to shift its merchandising strategy to optimize performance. That’s when Oakley turned to SPS Commerce and its Point of Sale (POS) Analytics.

The team at Oakley uses SPS Performance Analytics to drill down into the retailer’s sales records to reveal insights that could boost the retailer’s performance. With pre-built dashboards that offer immediate visibility into data that can be segmented by retailer, brand, category, geography or UPC, the solution helps Oakley rapidly assess the retailer’s risks and opportunities. Meanwhile, the solution’s comprehensive metrics across 800 different business drivers and user-friendly reporting helps Oakley quickly gain and share a complete view of the retailer’s product performance — without the need for IT assistance.

From these insights, Michelle McGriff, Oakley’s director of U.S. sales planning and operations, and her team, discovered two key facts. First, of the 40 Oakley items sold by the retailer, only about 10 — mostly newer apparel products that had yet to gain a following — were responsible for a dip in sales across the entire line. And second, the retailer’s sport sunglasses sales were strong, but Oakley’s distribution center had been out of stock when the retailer last reordered.

“That information becomes so vital when buyers call and say that the product isn’t selling,” McGriff says. “It shows that we understand their business and that we’re looking at and leveraging their sales data in a way that will help them drive their business.”