Forever 21 aligns assortments with consumer demand with Oracle Retail; 600 stores on tap
Los Angeles - Fast-fashion giant Forever 21 is on the fast-track, with plans to open 600 stores over the next three years. To help support its rapid growth, the retailer is using Oracle Retail solutions.
Forever 21, which now ranks as the fifth largest specialty retailer in the United States, is taking advantage of Oracle’s advanced optimization technology and using Oracle Retail Merchandise Planning and Optimization solutions to help predict demand and align its assortments to meet the expectations and demands of its customers. The retailer implemented Oracle Retail Assortment Planning and Size Profile Optimization to help ensure that the apparel and accessories it places in stores each week are those that customers are looking for, and that will help to fuel ongoing growth.
The Oracle system will help Forever 21’s merchandising team support new store growth with more streamlined and effective processes, using the system to predict when individual items will be in demand and in what colors, styles and quantities at each of its six websites and corporate, franchise and joint-venture owned stores in 43 countries.
Taking advantage of the science incorporated into Oracle Retail Assortment Planning and Size Profile Optimization, Forever 21 can make data-driven decisions to create optimal assortments based on determining factors such as neckline, price point, fabric and other variables influencing sales.
The Oracle Retail solution enables Forever 21 to improve planning decisions based on bottom-up data from its business units, taking into account the fast pace of style changes, number of SKUs, seasonality, and sizing demands, as well as product fabrication requirements and average unit retail costs.
“The Oracle Retail solution gives us a blueprint of where the assortment is going to lead us,” said Robert Kim, VP, planning and allocation, Forever 21. “Seeing the past performance by segment and looking at color penetration and fashion attributes is in itself a giant step forward, and the data can be sliced and diced in a way that is meaningful for our merchants. Oracle took a very complicated model and made it user-friendly. We expect to gain more insight and deliver an even better product assortment for our customers as we expand our use of the Oracle Retail solution.”
Forever 21 worked with Oracle and Veltio, an Oracle PartnerNetwork Gold-level member, to launch the solution in May 2014 following a nine-month implementation program that included data cleansing as well as design and user acceptance testing.