Artificial intelligence saas for prescribing optimal retail merchandising decisions
During the fall of 2018, retail sales broke new records throughout Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Single’s day. This should be good news for retailers, but the reality is that there’s a dark side to these triumphs - a large part of growth is driven by an increase of promotions, which is eroding the margins of many retailers. In fact, our data suggests that more than 70% of all supplier promotions and well above 30% of all retail promotions are unprofitable, even after adjusting for supplier funding. Particularly this hits the SMEs that feel much pressure from large players such as Amazon or Alibaba but do not have necessary competence and capacity to survive the competition. 

Formulate aims to provide a solution to these challenges by offering its DecisionCloud, a platform that combines our AI with company’s transaction data to create better stores and more satisfied customers. Whether it comes to selecting promotion items, the optimal price tactic, right media, or campaign timing, we empower the right decision for any retailer’s business. Based on our findings and our collaboration with academia, Formulate can double the impact from the merchandising decisions. 

With its full automation of AI, distributed analytics capabilities, low IT cost and easy on-boarding, Formulate stands out of competition. But most importantly, the product creates a much-needed market change and generates great positive impact on the retailer-supplier dynamics. Our ultimate goal is to enable retailers of all sizes – not only the largest tech giants – to have access to advanced AI that automates merchandising decisions.

The key objective of our project is to transform an initial business plan into a robust strategy for international commercialization and to prepare for a Phase 2 development. With this objective in mind, our Phase 1 project will consist of a more precise market evaluation, assessing technological needs for further scaling and optimizing our go-to-market strategy