Premium footwear brand selects Maple Lake for assortment management

Aerosoles, a leading US footwear brand found in thousands of stores worldwide, selected Maple Lake Ltd.’s QuickAssortment software to refine and centralize the retailers’ merchandise, store and assortment planning activities. The retailer has already completed phase one of the implementation process. 

“Operating a true multi-channel business with concept stores, outlet stores, e-commerce as well as a catalog and direct sales businesses requires some significant coordination; relying on spreadsheets is no longer an option for us,” said Tupper Kinder, Chief Information Officer at Aerosoles. “We needed a tool that was flexible enough to cater to our unique ways of working, robust enough to support our volumes and growth plans, but that was still a commercial solution so that we could remain on an upgrade path; QuickAssortment will give us all of this and more.”

Kinder continued: “Everyone in the business recognised the need for improvements in the way we plan and manage our inventory, the challenge was to find a partner who recognised the kind of business that we are and could still bring expertise and opinions to the table without changing the core of what makes us successful.”

“Aerosoles is a true multi-channel retailer and we are delighted to have them as partners,” said Stuart Aldridge, Chief Marketing Officer at Maple Lake. “Their vision of a centralized planning environment providing visibility to the cross-channel implications of the plans tied in perfectly with our single database, client server architecture.  The challenge was in providing planning methodologies that were appropriate for each individual channel, and still being able to consolidate to provide a corporate overview.”

The QuickAssortment solution will enable Aerosoles to coordinate all of the merchandise, store and channel plans as well as its assortment and key item plans in a single integrated environment.  This will reduce the time that the business currently spends on maintaining its existing spreadsheet infrastructure, and instead enable the company to develop more detailed plans and become more responsive to the latest trends.

Kinder continued: “We were impressed by the client portfolio that Maple Lake had built up, and we felt confident that their singular focus on planning has created expertise and skills that will help us during our implementation. This is not just a project; it’s a partnership.”

Phase 1 (Merchandise and Key Item Planning by channel) has been completed ahead of schedule and under budget.  QuickAssortment operates on a Microsoft SQL server platform and operates within a client-server architecture, with data being managed on the server to optimize performance and scalability.  QuickAssortment is routinely integrated to a wide variety of merchandise management and business intelligence (BI) systems.