Bealls Partners With Profitmind To Improve Merchandise Planning Accuracy

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📝 usncan Note: Bealls Partners With Profitmind To Improve Merchandise Planning Accuracy

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Bealls, a family-owned retailer with over a century of operations, was looking to improve the accuracy of its merchandise planning and raise profitability, so it partnered with Profitmind, the first native AI platform for retailers, launched in January of 2024.

“We were building an AI agent for merchandise planning and as far as we were aware it was the first ever AI agent to perform merchandise planning and analytics and other tasks,” said Dr. Mark Chrystal, CEO and co-founder of Profitmind. “Bealls was really forward-thinking and said this could be a really good match for what they were trying to do. We went through a pilot with the Bealls team and it worked really well.”

“Profitmind had been on our radar for several years,” said Matt Beall, chairman and CEO of Bealls Inc. “The data is going to be gathered in a way that we’re making logical decisions for what to buy more of, what to buy less of, and where to allocate products at the location level, so at the individual store level. It’s going to really help us get smarter with our open-to-buy, with what we’re purchasing and where we’re shipping it.”

Beall said Profitmind will help Bealls, which is based in Bradenton, Florida and operates over 660 stores in 22 states, identify and act on the small micro trends that occur at the individual store level and that buyers might otherwise miss.

“We might have put up guard rails and restricted ourselves from a planning and allocation standpoint with shipping windows based on seasonality and transitions that aren’t even real,” Beall said. “We may have made stupid human decisions. This solution will be able to help us remedy that and really help us get a lot faster and smarter with our purchase decisions. The assortment at the individual location level is going to be vastly improved by this partnership.”

According to Chrystal, Bealls saw a 20% improvement in general plan accuracy. “We also saw that the buying team accepted 80% of the recommendations from the Profitmind system,” he said. “It’s looking at the business and saying, ‘Here’s an action to take.’

“The Bealls business is actually a very dynamic and difficult business to forecast given the high turnover rate of products, so on our side we’re excited to see that the teams are accepting 80% of the opportunities that Profitmind is presenting to them,” Chrystal continued. “In terms of product, you’re talking sell-through and how quickly the product moves through the system. The market is very dynamic in terms of bringing in new products.”

There are no job layoffs or job losses resulting from the program, Beall said. Rather, buyers’ time is freed up, especially on Monday mornings when they were “used to burying their heads in spreadsheets and data and trying to make decisions,” he added. “This tool is going to allow us to eliminate all of the time we spend on that and allow people to refocus and have more strategic conversations and make more strategic decisions on ways to move the business forward.”

“This technology is different than a traditional machine learning model. The goal is really to think and operate the way the retail team would itself,” said Chrystal said, adding that Profitmind finds opportunities so it can accelerate them and “actually get the teams out of the tactical needle in a haystack analytics that they typically have to do and serve up to them an analysis of the business and where the opportunities are.”

That way, Chrystal said, they can move faster and be more focused on execution and delivery versus simply analyzing the business.