Tailored Brands is a leading omni-channel menswear and formalwear retailer, operating 1,000 stores under brands such as Men’s Wearhouse, Jos. A. Bank, Moores and family retailer K&G Fashion Superstore. A key component of its business is tuxedo rentals for weddings, proms and other formal events.
Tailored Brands is dedicated to delivering exceptional customer experiences. To achieve this, the retailer needed to ensure that inventory was available in the right place, at the right time, while maintaining optimal inventory levels to drive revenue growth. However, managing inventory for its tuxedo rental business presented significant challenges.
Handling millions of reservations annually, Tailored Brands had to anticipate evolving customer preferences for various styles, colors and sizes. With a vast number of SKUs to manage and only spreadsheets and outdated systems in place, planning teams lacked a scalable solution for making precise inventory allocation and replenishment decisions.
The rental model added another layer of complexity. Apparel rental supply chains are inherently circular, with items returning to one of four distribution centers (DCs) for reallocation. Some items are returned damaged or not returned at all, contributing to inventory imbalances if not properly accounted for.
These challenges led to frequent stockout-based substitutions. Customers arriving to pick up their reserved items would often find that their selected choices were unavailable, resulting in substitutions that diminished the shopping experience and negatively affected earnings.
To modernize inventory management for its tuxedo rental business, Tailored Brands sought a retail allocation software solution capable of:
Tailored Brands chose to partner with invent.ai, a global retail planning solutions provider that delivers measurable profit improvements to large retailers. Invent.ai stood out for its ability to provide rapid implementation and prove quantifiable results.
Quickly, the company was able to implement invent.ai’s AI-driven profit-optimization platform to automate return forecasting, buy and inventory decisions. The solution uses AI to analyze massive amounts of data, accounting for hundreds of internal and external variables, to accurately predict future reservations and returns down to the individual store/SKU level.
With this predictive capability, planning teams receive prescriptive recommendations in advance. Rather than adhering to simple inventory planning rules, the AI platform evaluates every possible scenario and determines the optimal inventory placement to maximize earnings. These intelligent allocation decisions ensure inventory is distributed optimally across styles, colors, sizes and locations.
As customer preferences evolve, the transfer optimization solution continuously adjusts inventory distribution across locations. It identifies underperforming inventory and reallocates it to where demand is higher, ensuring maximum revenue potential.
Finally, invent.ai’s solution tackles one of Tailored Brands’ biggest uncertainties: rental item attrition. By predicting when and where rented items will be returned—and in what condition—the solution factors these insights into future demand forecasts and determines precise replenishment needs for each DC.
Using invent.ai’s Proof of Value approach, Tailored Brands saw results immediately:
Inventory optimization means growing your sales and customer service, while lowering inventory investment. It’s doing more with less. Invent.ai’s solution not only helped us grow customer satisfaction and service on a lower inventory base, but also avoid disappointing the customer with substitutions. We saw great results very quickly. Speed to value was also crucial for us. The default assumption is that a project like this would take up to 12 months. But thanks to invent.ai’s agile approach to implementation, it was just five months from start to value realized.
Tailored Brands’ inventory optimization initiative has driven value across customers, inventory planners and the business. With the right products readily available, customers enjoy a superior shopping experience, while the company achieves stronger sales and revenue growth.