With a presence in 33 countries, including the US, Canada, Germany, Russia, Australia and Turkey, Mavi is among the leading premium denim brands. To increase availability, ensure flexible allocation management and provide efficient inventory visibility, Mavi needed superior inventory and markdown optimization capabilities. The retailer also aimed to improve gross margin and sell-through.
To achieve its mission, Mavi turned to invent.ai, a global provider of AI-powered inventory optimization solutions, software and tools, including Allocation optimization, Replenishment optimization, Transfer optimization and Markdown optimization. As a result, Mavi maximized profitability, increased product availability and reduced lost sales through better inventory planning and markdown optimization.
Number of stores 439
Number of points of sale 4,500
The challenge: Increasing inventory optimization efficiency
Founded in 1991 and selling its products through approximately 4,500 sales points, including 439 stores, Mavi is recognized as a highly successful global lifestyle brand. As a leading premium denim company, Mavi runs an omnichannel model. It offers its products through a directly operated retail network with stores in major international fashion centers, department stores and online retailers, including Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom, Simons, Amazon, Zappos.com, Zalando.com and David Jones.
To maintain a good customer experience with an increasing store and product count, Mavi needed a system that supported more agile and faster decision-making. invent.ai’s solutions facilitated these decisions, driving higher profitability, lower time spent and more reliable conclusions.
Gross margin growth
Choosing invent.ai’s inventory optimization solutions
Mavi had the vision of offering new products to their customers without compromising accurate inventory management. With that, the company aimed to strengthen its brand loyalty, gain new customers and increase sales.
To bring its ambitious goals to life, Mavi needed a new set of solutions which offered:
- Deeper decisioning: User-friendly systems with the flexibility to drill down to the data level and improve decision making.
- New dimensions: AI-based advanced tools that bring together retail planning data, predict outcomes and optimize inventory.
- Autonomous systems with advanced reporting capabilities: Robust tools and dashboard that eliminate the many man-hours spent looking into historical data and instead facilitate a focus on exception management.
Following an extensive market analysis and assessment cycle to select a partner for this project, invent.ai was chosen because its inventory optimization tools aligned with Mavi’s goals.
“Invent.ai provides tailor-fit solutions to retailers’ problems. Its fashion retail industry-specific expertise and dedicated data analytics team are the other reasons behind our decision to partner with invent.ai,” says Sinan Sefai, Chief Sourcing and Supply Chain Officer, Mavi.
Fast implementation, fast results
Mavi implemented invent.ai’s AI-powered Allocation Optimization, Replenishment Optimization, Transfer Optimization and Markdown Optimization solutions.
Invent.ai delivered speed to value and a quick implementation, handling the data transition carefully. The initial implementation experienced an enormous data load. After going live, Mavi revised its internal infrastructure and data warehouse four times. Invent.ai successfully adapted to the changes, including the data transition process for SAP implementation. During all the revisions, invent.ai’s systems worked flawlessly.
Profit-optimizing allocation and replenishment through inventory optimization software
Mavi quickly saw the benefits of inventory optimization solutions. Using the Replenishment and Allocation solution, it upgraded its inventory decisions from a judgment-driven, KPI-measured process to a financial optimization-driven and measured process.
Through automatic decision-making, the system now creates replenishment orders at a granular level, such as size and color. It considers various parameters, including sales history, lost sales, stock amount and future events (such as special days, local events and markdowns) for each option.
Invent.ai provides quarterly post-mortem product distribution and suggestions for increasing or decreasing the number of product and price group options in stores, taking into consideration sales, ST, GMROI, store type, MD, ITR and store capacity.
With the allocation optimization solution, each store's specific size assortment and quantity are provided depending on their KPI performances and product attributes during the initial allocation.
Thanks to the sophisticated allocation and replenishment systems, Mavi continually optimizes inventory and achieves higher availability while minimizing costs.
Proactively rebalancing inventory across locations
With Transfers, Mavi rebalances inventory across locations for maximum efficiency. The retailer can now make optimized transfer decisions on more than 2000 options and 325 stores to improve sales.
“Invent.ai’s Transfers helps us dynamically manage the inventory imbalance between the stores. As a result, we can now sell products with higher turnover, higher GMROI, lower markdowns and lower logistics costs," says Sinan Sefai of Mavi.
Increasing availability and reducing lost sales through inventory optimization tools
Mavi treats lost sales as missed opportunities for higher growth in the following season. The retailer uses invent.ai’s out-of-stock item/lost sales analysis as input in the pre-season planning phase. Mavi tracks lost sales by category and sends lost sales by category weekly to category and planning teams so that they can take immediate operational actions.
The future with invent.ai
Mavi has ambitious goals for the future.
“We value our partnership with invent.ai a lot. For us, it’s much more than a client/vendor relationship. We are partners working together to push boundaries in retail operations today and tomorrow.” says Sinan Sefai of Mavi.
The iconic retailer plans to implement omnichannel analytics, assortment planning and optimization in partnership with invent.ai.