Indonesia’s e-commerce industry is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. Every day, new brands are flooding the already saturated market – making it increasingly easier to drown amidst the noise. Arief Dermawan, the Head Merchandiser of This Is April, knows this all too well.
That’s why the fast-fashion brand uses Omnilytics to stay on top of market demands.
“Data is crucial for us to get ahead of our competitors,” says Arief.
This Is April uses Omnilytics to plan the season ahead, as well as to do daily trading. With over 60 physical stores across Indonesia and Malaysia combined with an evergrowing e-commerce business, the brand needs to ensure the right product is at the right price, in the right market, in the right store and at the right time.
This is where Omnilytics comes in.
Staying ahead of the market
For Arief, Omnilytics helps to ensure every single product at This Is April is optimised to its fullest potential.
“Omnilytics’ data has been really useful in the assortment planning process,” says Arief. “We can easily identify the top-selling products, colours or detailing that we should invest in.”
He uses Omnilytics to provide validation when planning the depth and width of the brand’s assortment, ultimately speeding up the time-to-market process.
Staying on top of trend developments within Indonesia and international markets is fundamental for any merchandiser. “With Omnilytics, we can easily keep tabs on trending products and monitor competitors. This allows us to quickly spot and fill market opportunities,” he says.
Making informed decisions with precision
Before Omnilytics, assortment planning at This Is April was gut-driven. “We relied on intuition or simply followed what was trending,” he adds.
This Is April’s merchandising team used to spend long hours on trend research, identifying popular colour palettes, patterns and motifs to incorporate into the assortments. With Omnilytics, they are able to pinpoint bestselling design for the market, effectively minimising risks.
Omnilytics also helped to remove the second-guessing altogether, and the team can confidently track trends from various product categories, markets and segments on a global level.
Arief and his merchandising team also refer to Omnilytics to do trade reporting. To optimise the brand’s online assortment, the team analyses the performance of its products on a weekly basis. The complicated and time-consuming process of extracting data on product sell-out, bestsellers and slow-movers can be shortened to just a few hours.
“The most immediate benefit of using Omnilytics is the quick access to real-time market, which helps us to expedite the production timeline greatly,” says Arief.
Speeding up manual processes
This applies to Puji Gonawi, the head of IoT and e-commerce team as well. He monitors stock replenishments for the brand’s online sales channels – a task that’s crucial to ensure brand growth.
“Omnilytics allows me to monitor ageing products, alerting me to take immediate action,” says Puji. By spotting slow-moving products early on, Puji is able to quickly drive these products out with gradual markdowns – rather than wait for the seasonal sales when these aged stocks would’ve seeped into margins.
With rich market insights at his fingertips, Puji is able to plan the brand’s growth direction. He often reads Omnilytics’ industry reports to gain insights into the fashion industry as a whole.
“The industry reports touch on various sectors of the industry, as this gives me a wide overview of both local and international market conditions,” he adds.
“Overall, Omnilytics sped up many of our processes. Now, tasks that take a week can now be done within a few hours and this allows us to focus on other important tasks.”
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