How we can help

Vantage℠

Location is everything. Now more than ever, retailers need to get it right. Vantage not only helps you identify optimal sites for your business—it helps you rethink every facet of your existing geographic footprint.

The retail industry has entered an era of unprecedented innovation and change. The growing role of digital technology and rapid shifts in customer behavior have led brands to rethink their physical footprint. Retailers are transforming their physical assets, testing new formats that redefine the “store of the future.” Amid a global shift to e-commerce, how can you adapt your network of physical locations?

Our answer is Vantage, a cutting-edge location intelligence solution you can deploy everywhere in the world. It combines our firm’s trademark strategic thinking with advanced analysis to support your footprint decisions. Our team will augment our well-known industry expertise with geospatial data and proprietary algorithms to reveal value wherever it may hide. More than just a tool, Vantage makes visible the forces and trends that predict which of your stores will thrive, which are eating into each other’s business, and which don’t yet exist — but should.

Vantage’s user-friendly data visualizations allow you to explore the key financial data for each of your existing locations. Site by site, you can see how proximity to other points of interest—department stores, restaurants, etc.—affects the foot traffic that drives performance. These insights will help you identify optimal new locations and test their value in real time. Vantage can help orchestrate an expansion or reorganization of your brick-and-mortar operations, or monitor your existing footprint to determine how well it meets evolving customer demands.

Under more pressure than ever before, leading retailers are remodeling physical assets to support new customer experiences. Vantage lets you test these and other store-based fulfillment options, so you can experiment and identify the real-estate solutions that will best complement your online sales and brand power.

Now is the time to assess the health of your existing footprint, pilot new site formats, and prepare to scale innovations that show the most promise. Vantage enables you to make smart choices about the position and design of your company’s locations.

What to Expect

Development expertise

Decades of experience upholds our team’s ability to identify where value is and how to translate that knowledge into results.

Powerful analytics

Vantage marshals a wide array of preloaded data sources, combining them with machine-learning algorithms to make location-based predictions of future site performance.

Dynamic visualization

Our user-friendly dashboard lets you analyze data and test hypotheses while making key decisions about your store footprint.

Continuous learning

Vantage is designed around a flexible, cloud-based architecture powered by seamless data access, so it continually delivers fresh insights long after we’ve implemented it for you.

How Does Vantage Work?

Vantage is a comprehensive solution that helps you not only develop the most successful footprint strategy but also accelerate its execution. Developed in our exclusive partnership with Carto, and backed by our firm’s legendary retail knowledge and development playbooks, Vantage helps you locate the right type of store at precisely the right place.

Powering this tool is an extensive library of advanced datasets with global coverage built into the platform that our team will custom-tailor for your brand’s unique purposes, augmenting them with new sources as necessary. Vantage then applies cutting-edge machine learning analytics to these datasets, testing hundreds of variables with a customizable sequence of algorithms to generate site-specific predictions. Like the datasets themselves, our models are carefully tailored for your specific brand, assets, and strategies.

Central to Vantage is a dynamic, user-friendly dashboard that enables you to explore the potential impact of your company’s strategies on site selection and store formats. Cloud-based and accessible to stakeholders with specified user rights, the dashboard lets you visualize the results of your location decisions before you make them.

Vantage allows you to test and model a variety of site-selection scenarios at the most granular level, gaining an unparalleled understanding of store performance, sales cannibalization, and optimal store format. Questions that Vantage can answer for you include: Are my stores performing as well as expected? Is this a good site to build a new store? What returns can I expect? How would changes at this site impact my existing stores? For a given market, how can I optimize my footprint? And which stores should I close or open?

Vantage can be configured to automatically refresh itself with new data whenever it becomes available, be it overnight, monthly, or a on a quarterly basis. To make certain the solution will work for you, we will co-develop it will all the key stakeholders in your organization, aligning it to the needs of your operators, marketing and legal teams, finance departments, and data scientists.

With Vantage, your experimentation can be continuous. Unlike other providers offering a one-off report, the Vantage toolkit will stay with you and deliver fresh insights long after our engagement ends, in keeping with our firm's objective to build and strengthen our client's capabilities.