Caleres (formerly Brown Shoe Company) is a diverse portfolio of global brands, operating over 1,200 retail stores under the brand name Famous Footwear, and also operates 100 specialty retail stores in the United States, Canada and China under the Naturalizer name.
Caleres needed an analytical solution to help them prioritize development opportunities across the country. They had reached a point where store development needed to aggressively address market voids and the changing demographics in their customer base. Existing analytical tools available to them were not designed to address the complexities that they faced.
Caleres had not built a site model in many years to support the execution and creation of successful individual site and market location strategies. After a thorough evaluation of vendors in the space, they quickly realized that Tango had the depth of capabilities they required. Caleres selected Tango due to the unique approach that Tango had which included departmental specific sales forecasting as well as the integration of Ecommerce analytics into the effort. The departmental sales forecasting (e.g., men’s casual, women’s casual, children’s shoes, accessories, etc.) was viewed as having significant cross functional value to marketing and merchandising in addition to real estate.
Caleres retained Tango to implement a site forecasting and market optimization model for our Famous Footwear Division. Through this partnership, we have gained new insights, which are helping drive our portfolio strategy around current and future locations.”
Tango started by helping Caleres prioritize markets and better allocate their capital spend through an optimization modules, which enabled them to understand the market level opportunity before drilling down into individual sites and location. Caleres also started to utilize Tango’s proprietary Smart Analogs which enabled them to match existing store performance to the core variables driving sales forecasts for new locations.
Caleres was challenged with understanding the affect new locations were having on their existing stores, so Tango built a sales forcasting which included cannibalization methodologies. The models also allowed them to conduct reverse cannibalization analysis to help them understand what happened to existing stores if they decided to close one of their locations, and the impact on existing store sales.
When it came to understanding their customer, they had data from a strong loyalty program which Tango used to help them track customer shopping patterns. Tango also helped Caleres understand the extent of trade areas based on the various types of malls their locations were in. For example, Tango helped them answer the following: How far does a closed mall pull from versus an external shopping center location? Or, what is the difference in trade areas of an A versus B mall – or a super- regional, regional or community mall?
Tango also helped them merchandise individual locations to better address the requirements of the customer base. Not only did Caleres now understand total projected volume, but also volume
at the category level – for example, how many children’s shoes, women’s boots or men’s dress shoes would sell. This department-by- department focus helps them merchandise their store properly, and helps them better understand how much space they should allocate to each department within any given location.
Caleres is also taking advantage of Tango’s mobile capabilities, which enable territory real estate managers to run a site through the system to quickly visualize the trade area, harvest demographics, and quickly understand any competitive threats, before providing the site to their market research department.
Findings from the projects were very comprehensive, and provide much needed customer intelligence for both Caleres’ Merchandising and Operations departments. Based on this success, they expanded the use and scope of Tango’s models to make better decisions about how they staff and merchandise stores, and how they approach competitors.
Tango also worked with the Marketing department to help them understand how our model could be used to help them to better target market different ethnic market, in particular around merchandising and marketing.
As a testament to the success of the project, Tango’s relationship with Caleres is ongoing, and we continually seek opportunities to help improve their location decision making.