American Apparel Wins Store Operations Superstar Award by Retail TouchPoints

SAN JOSE, Calif., Aug. 29, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- RetailNext, the leader in comprehensive in-store analytics, today announced that American Apparel, a retailer of branded fashion-basic apparel with 285 stores, was named a Retail TouchPoints' Store Operations Superstar in the Loss Prevention category, for implementing one of the industry's most innovative and successful store operations strategies.

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In 2009, executives at American Apparel had a desire to deepen the chain's understanding of shopper behavior in their brick-and-mortar stores. The company sought to apply similar methods to those used on the American Apparel website and by its e-commerce peers – measurement and testing of stores, with the ultimate goal of increasing sales and improving the customer experience.

"Our idea was to close the information gap between online and brick-and-mortar channels and RetailNext made that possible," said American Apparel CIO, Stacey Shulman. "By combining our traffic management and loss prevention systems into a single platform, not only did we save 40% in capital costs, but we also made asset protection more efficient by applying analytics to our LP needs. We are proud of this accomplishment and honored to be named a Store Operations Superstar."

With RetailNext, American Apparel was able to interpret streams of digital video and recognize human beings moving through the stores, opening up broad capabilities for measuring shopper behavior inside its environment. This capability enabled American Apparel to measure not only the number of store visitors, but also shoppers' movements within the store – where they walked, where they stopped and how all these behaviors tied to actual sales at the register.

"Using insights gained from the RetailNext platform, the American Apparel team has increased sales in equipped stores by more than 30% and reduced theft in these same stores 16%," writes Retail TouchPoints.  "And the presence of searchable, instantly available video has created a cultural shift in which operations professionals at headquarters are much more directly in touch with the goings-on in their stores all across the country."

"The dedication of American Apparel's store operations leadership to more comprehensive and actionable measurement has led to enormous bottom-line improvement," said CEO of RetailNext, Alexei Agratchev. "Using insights gained from the RetailNext platform in 60% of its stores, the team at American Apparel can now identify trends and exceptions, drive increased sales in these stores and reduce shrink. They are the embodiment of store operations superstars and we at RetailNext congratulate them on this big win."

About RetailNext
RetailNext is the leader in Applied Big Data for offline retail, delivering real-time analytics that enable retailers and manufacturers to monitor, collect, analyze, and visualize in-store data.  The company uses best-in-class video analytics, on-shelf sensors, and data from point-of-sale systems and other sources, to automatically inform retailers about how people engage in their stores. The highly scalable RetailNext products easily integrate with promotional calendars, staffing systems, and even weather services, to analyze how internal and external factors impact customer shopping patterns – providing store operations executives with the ability to identify opportunities for growth, execute changes and measure success.

Headquartered in San Jose, CA, RetailNext tracks more than 300 million shoppers per year by collecting data from more than 20,000 sensors in retail stores and capturing and analyzing trillions of data points each year.  RetailNext is a growing global brand operating in 18 countries.  For more information, call +1-888-609-5877.

SOURCE RetailNext