Cash shrink from six percent to one
All Star Elite, an apparel retailer, cut cash shrink from 6 percent to 1 and halved investigation time. Then the store teams used the same cameras to decide where the Kobe jersey goes.
Six percent cash shrink is the kind of number that ends careers in retail. All Star Elite, a multi-location sports-apparel chain, brought it down to one percent, according to Spot AI's published case study. Then its store teams found other things to do with the cameras.
One database
Andrew Gonzalez, the company's corporate director of loss prevention and safety, credits something unglamorous: putting everything in one place.
The ability to formalize our incident reporting, have all our cases on one database, and attach videos to those cases has been a game changer for our team.
Investigations became more than 50 percent faster, the company says, and the timeline for a law-enforcement case fell from two or three months to one. There is nothing exotic about that. An incident, its footage and its paperwork sit in one record, so nobody has to reassemble the case for the police. If you run a loss-prevention team you know this bottleneck.
The Kobe jersey
Once the cameras were doing loss prevention, the store teams started using them for something else. Gonzalez again:
When we figure out the correct placement of our Kobe jersey within the store, that typically increases sales by 5% to 15% because we're able to pull traffic into other areas, and get ideas on other products that pair it with.
The same people-counting and traffic data that catches a register anomaly also shows where customers walk. The retailer used it to move merchandise, and the company reports sales lifts of 5 to 15 percent from placement alone.
It cut the other way too. The metrics flagged three stores whose trend "was going to lend itself to not being profitable in the near future." In Gonzalez's words, "Those are three stores that probably would've existed for another year at a loss. But we caught it early because of the metrics from Spot AI."
The view from asset protection
William Heard, the director of asset protection, gets two lines in the case study. "Spot has brought to our forefront nothing but good things," he says. "I feel we're really getting our money's worth, and there's still a lot more that we could do with this."
That last clause turns up in most of the retail case studies Spot AI has published. The purchase gets approved on shrink. Then the traffic data starts showing up in merchandising and staffing decisions, and eventually in real estate, and none of that was in the original business case. Cash shrink from six percent to one is what got All Star Elite to sign. What would your store managers do with the traffic data once they had it?