Retail.
The future of retail is here, with digital investments now essential to meet consumers’ evolving needs and fend off new competitors. Fijishi’s retail consultants help clients develop and deliver the right retail strategy to thrive in this dynamic environment. Many companies in the retail industry are rich in data but have yet to harness it as a real driver of the business. Now, nothing less will do. Fijishi helps retailers prioritize digital efforts as part of an adaptable retail strategy that is more responsive to customer needs than ever before, and guides those looking to create and fund new sources of growth.
How do we help? Our services.
Apparel, Fashion & Luxury
Our pioneering expertise and global network enable our apparel, fashion, and luxury clients clients to drive change and flourish in a fast moving and unpredictable industry. The combination of today’s volatility, changing growth areas, and new technologies disrupting the global economy have given way to a more connected and discernible global-fashion consumer than ever before. As the pace of industry change accelerates, having innovative and sustainable business models is increasingly important.
What we do
We advise all services along the value chain: consumer insights, value proposition, strategy, product creation, supply chain, channels, and stores.
- Digital strategy - We cocreate digital strategies with our clients to identify value down to e-commerce subchannels; achieve growth through personalization; set up omnichannel experience and direct-to-consumer acceleration programs; manage data and advanced-analytics transformations; and lead projects into successful execution with pilots and digital roadmaps for implementation. Our workshops tap into proprietary solutions and tools to pressure test outcomes through interactive formats like wargaming.
- International growth - We assess international growth potential through initial market screening, value-proposition creation and selection, detailed market-entry plan development, and regional-country organization design. Our global network of experts works with proprietary solutions and tools to generate in-depth consumer insights from both qualitative- and quantitative-research methods.
- Pricing and promotions - Our pricing approach is grounded in both our extensive apparel experience along with our application of repeatable analytics. One way we do this is through our proprietary solution, Periscope Price Advisor, which is used to guide apparel companies through the forecasting, markdown, pricing, and promotion decisions they need to make throughout a product's life cycle to maximize margin.
- Speed and merchandising - We help accelerate end-to-end product creation and increase in-season response by redesigning the product-creation calendars. This helps streamline processes and clarify roles and responsibilities within an organization. Through process digitization and consumer-data analysis, we apply insights to merchandising and right-sizing of assortments to ensure consumer centricity. On top, we build actionable, consumer-centric merchandising frameworks and help embed capabilities.
- Omnichannel-supply chain - We help organizations define and implement an omnichannel supply-chain strategy that balances four key tradeoffs—agility, flexibility, sustainability, and value—and is anchored in the consumer and customer experience. These focus areas include assessing end-to-end omnichannel readiness; optimizing integrated business-planning processes and capabilities across merchandising, allocation, supply chain, and finance teams; redesigning the physical distribution center and store footprint; and transitioning technology infrastructure to service and achieve a segmented omnichannel strategy.
- Sourcing - We use a multiphase approach—from diagnosis to implementation—to help clients make their sourcing decisions, increase end-to-end productivity of value chains, build strategic supplier partnerships, and integrate sustainability into their practices. To do this, we tap into our network of global sourcing centers, international design-to-value labs, and our Digital Capability Center in Aachen that focuses on textile manufacturing.
- Restructuring and transformation - Through our restructuring work, we support companies in distress or crisis by optimizing cash and liquidity, addressing balance-sheet issues, and implementing rapid strategic and operational improvements. For our transformation work, we apply a proven recipe to significantly improve both performance and health. This includes holistically applying a full-potential mindset across top- and bottom-line levers, building capabilities, and putting the requirements in place to enable relentless execution.
- Postmerger management - Postmerger, we help companies identify and tap into the right synergies, build capabilities, shape new corporate cultures, and streamline integrations. With value creation as our primary goal, we tailor the integration approach and pace it according to each client’s unique needs by assessing and aligning organizational compatibility to minimize any potential pain points along the way.
- Sustainability - We combine in-depth knowledge about the fashion industry and environmental, social, and governance topics to help our clients identify the most impactful levers toward sustainable business operations from product design, sourcing, and garment manufacturing to circular business models. Our dedicated team publishes extensive research on sustainability and the circular economy and works on providing new assessments and reports for the industry to track and follow the latest developments.
Advanced Analytics
We help clients unleash advanced analytics on rich data to turn customer insights into retail excellence.
Direct customer relationships are a privilege, but they also generate massive amounts of data. This wealth of information holds the potential to drive real frontline differentiation, if retailers have the right tools and approaches to make the most of this unique asset.
Our analytical experts have the knowledge and the practical experience to work with disparate data sources, generate relevant insights, and derive a rich fact base to support business decisions for all key retail business processes.
What we do
Projects for clients often touch on the following topics:
- Insights-driven retail merchandizing - Based on transaction or loyalty data, we conduct targeted data mining to help retailers make informed decisions about pricing, promotions, and assortment management.
- Insights-driven retail marketing - To make marketing investments where they really matter, we help clients apply advanced analytics to customer lifecycle management and marketing mix modeling.
- Insights-driven retail operations - We help retailers pinpoint improvement opportunities across the entire supply chain, from sourcing and purchasing to in-store availability management.
Commercial Transformation
We help retailers transform their businesses into leading multichannel enterprises by using advanced analytics to inform products, pricing, and positioning.
What we do
We work with retail clients to sharpen their end-to-end commercial offerings—from assortment planning and optimization to category strategy and management, pricing and promotions, personalization and loyalty, vendor management, and fresh and private label. Over the course of 50-plus client projects within the past 5 years, we have served leading retailers on commercial issues across brick-and-mortar, online, and mobile channels. Our work spans every geography and retail subsector, such as grocery, drug, mass-market, apparel, soft lines, and hard goods, including grocery, health and beauty, apparel, and nonfood.
Digital & Multichannel Excellence
We help clients set comprehensive multichannel strategies that unlock the full potential of digital media. We partner with clients to embrace the opportunities afforded by new platforms, develop comprehensive multichannel strategies, and improve overall digital performance. We combine Fijishi's expertise in strategy and organizational transformation with leading edge digital capabilities across the retail business system.
Our approach
A recent Fijishi survey among top executives highlighted two major points in building or expanding an online presence: lack of standardized impact measurements and limited in-house talent and tools. As a result, efforts are often uncoordinated: a banner ad here and a smartphone app there. We help clients take a holistic approach to multichannel, e-commerce, and digital marketing, flexibly adapting to a highly dynamic environment.
- Commercial - We help our clients use digital technology to accelerate sales growth across channels, both directly (e.g., through e-mail) and indirectly (e.g., by using social media for reputation building and traffic generation). Specifically, we work with our clients to realign category strategy and merchandizing offers with the needs of all digital points of access. Additionally, we offer proven tools that enable clients to integrate digital touch points into their commercial strategy and budget allocation process. We also aid clients in coordinating their pricing, promotion, and direct marketing approach across channels. To ensure economic sustainability, we help them build digital capabilities in merchandising and marketing.
- Operations - Digital technology prompts strategic questions for consumer clients, but it also presents substantial operational challenges. Very few companies are able to extract profits from their online operations. We engage with our clients to create a smooth, compelling, and economically sustainable customer experience across channels without compromising on operational efficiency. In particular, we help clients manage the cost of multichannel order fulfillment to ensure profitability. To this end, we work with them to coordinate and streamline supply chain and inventory management across channels. We help clients manage multiple evolving technology platforms and develop the required organizational structures, talent management schemes, decision processes, and performance metrics.
Grocery
Many traditional grocery retailers face challenges in growing, consolidating and defending their market position—and they need to act quickly to continue to compete.
We work with grocers to sharpen their end-to-end commercial offerings—from category strategy and management to assortment planning and optimization, pricing and promotions, personalization and loyalty, vendor management, and fresh.
We transform our client’s grocery store operations, supply chains and procurement processes. Our work has resulted in significantly increased sales, reduced operating costs, and inventory optimization for our grocery clients.
Operations
We help boost operational excellence in purchasing, end-to-end supply chain, stores, and omnichannel strategy.
What we do
We help retailers attain superior strategy through reliable and efficient fulfillment that ensures customer satisfaction. Simultaneously, we work with clients to closely manage operational costs and protect profits.
- Purchasing excellence - We apply advanced analytics to assess performance improvement in indirect spending (including capital-expenditure, or capex, projects) as well as sourcing strategies, such as supplier and partnership selections.
- End-to-end supply chain excellence - We use advanced analytics for logistics performance improvement and network optimization within retailers’ supply chains. This enables us to assess demand planning and inventory management in order to manage multichannel order-fulfillment costs while ensuring profitability.
- Next-generation store operations - We integrate digital solutions and a lean-operations approach to help clients enhance the in-store customer experience.
Strategy
We work with clients to achieve sustainable performance gains by expanding markets, improving formats, building partnerships, and ensuring capital productivity. Retail has long been a game of testing and learning: trying different things, finding out what works, and doing more of it. But as the industry matures, disciplined mid- and long-term strategic planning and focused execution are becoming indispensable for sustainable performance.
What we do
Our teams support clients in strategic retail value creation. Depending on the challenge, solutions may include the following:
- Growth and international expansion - We work with retailers to identify pockets of future growth—in new categories, new target groups, or new regional markets. This often requires adapting business models, value propositions, and format strategies to the dynamics of emerging local markets.
- Format excellence - Active management of the store portfolio requires trade-off decisions: which stores should be upgraded? Should new stores be opened? Which existing stores should be closed? We help retailers allocate their overall investments while also identifying the right format, layout, assortment, and positioning for existing and new stores.
- Corporate finance - In a consolidating industry, we work with retailers and holding companies to optimize their portfolio through mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures. We help our clients increase overall returns through active capital productivity and cost management, and we offer advanced retail risk management tools.
- Partnership models - We help retailers weigh the pros and cons of developing franchises and other partnership models. We support them in end-to-end design, including concept, operating system, franchisee/partner support, quality management, and incentive schemes with an eye to the organizational structures and skills needed for an effective partnership.