GJM Associates Inc.

Welcome to Retail Online Integration's annual Resource Guide. This special section offers all the crucial details, company information, contact numbers and addresses of product and service providers to the cross-channel retail industry.

In a session we co-presented at the recent National Conference on Operations & Fulfillment in Las Vegas, we led a panel that delivered the following top five inventory planning best practices:

Merchandise is still king. That was only one of a handful of themes taken from a wide-ranging and spirited session at last week’s NEMOA Spring 2008 Conference in Cambridge, Mass. This particular session included Derrick Egbert, president of New Perspectives; Allen Abbott, EVP/COO of Paul Frederick MenStyle; Jonathan Fleischmann, president/ CEO of the Potpourri Group; and Dana Pappas, COO/CFO of Plow & Hearth. It focused on the pressures of managing a catalog business in today’s uncertain economic times. Below are some of the tips/observations taken from the panelists and audience members. * Merchandise: “It’s the starting point,” Fleischmann said. The need for collaboration

Employ a Detailed Approach to Merchandise Analysis

From a “bottom up” view, catalog/multichannel marketers must consider every aspect of an item’s performance or life cycle to ensure every touchpoint to profitability is being considered properly. An item’s profitability is impacted by much more than simply demand and margin. I offer a top-down approach, which is extremely critical to the planning process. I also go to the opposite spectrum, however, and consider detail levels that often are overlooked when considering an item’s true profitability. If you hold your products to higher standards by factoring all their costs up front, you can gain greater profit to the bottom line. Let’s break down these

Employ a Detailed Approach to Merchandise Analysis

Merchandise analysis is an ongoing process. Although most companies should schedule formal reviews at the end of each season, the key to profitability is staying on top of the metrics that drive any multichannel business. Postmortems, as many of these reviews have been labeled, have a negative connotation in many marketers’ minds, and as a result, often are sidestepped. I’ve found that changing them to “preseason kick off” reviews promotes an offensive approach to profitability that can be maintained throughout the season. Of course, each business can apply its own weight to the measures to make final decisions. As multichannel merchants say, “It’s all about

Introduction In this, our annual special report on merchandising, you’ll learn strategies on generating new product concepts from scratch. It’s a process that is part art, part science: from knowing when to listen to your hunches to understanding how to test products on the page. You’ll also learn six steps to successfully taking a plunge into a new merchandise category. And we’ve uncovered some best practices you can use to get your product vendors to deliver merchandise on time and on spec, and ultimately how to improve your day-to-day relations with product vendors. Lastly, you’ll meet one of your colleagues, Doreen Carstens, vice

Merchandise forecasting systems exist in a world unto themselves. And yet they’re basic tools that any mid-to-large-sized cataloger needs to compete successfully. Still, few catalog executives choose to make the investment in such solutions. In most cases, this reluctance is caused by two factors. On the one hand, no one in the company may “own” the issue of making strategic inventory decisions. Merchants may make product selections, buyers decide whom to purchase from, marketers determine price points, and inventory managers must find a place to store the items or arrange for drop shipment. Yet no one takes full responsibility for determining exactly how

Of course you measure product and category sales, but if you're not also measuring product demand, you could be leaving a lot of money on the table, according to George Mollo, president of GJM Associates, an inventory planning and merchandising consultant. "In your call center, set up a way to capture demand, not just sales. For instance, say you sell women's jackets in various colors. Black was the most requested color, but you ran out of black jackets, and some customers ordered navy instead. Meanwhile, other customers who wanted black didn't order anything. You need a way to measure how many black jackets you