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Durham-based Sizeo Helps Retailers Right-Size Their Inventory—Literally
GrepBeat Article - by Cooper Metts - March 26, 2024
Gray King said that after graduating from Boston College’s MBA program back in 2008, “I did everything I could not to go back into retail.” Yet, he’s spent all of his 20-year career in retail and supply chain management.
So, when a Triangle-based startup that leverages AI to solve inventory issues for retailers recently asked him to be its CEO, the opportunity excited him. He officially took over last month.
“What I saw was a really unique opportunity to solve a problem that nobody really has been able to solve,” King said. “The technology really enables a different solution, so that kind of gets me pretty excited.”
A group of seven founders with entrepreneurial and retail backgrounds founded Durham-based Sizeo in 2022 and have since bootstrapped the startup.
Sizeo is a B2B SaaS startup at the beginning of commercialization that uses AI and existing retail data to help retailers and brands determine inventory needs by size based on stock-keeping units (SKUs) such as color and material.
“Our models can tell us that a specific blue polo shirt will sell in a certain size curve (in) small, medium, large, XL, XXL in a specific location,” King said.
King said that many companies and their analytics systems aren’t planning inventory for individual SKUs based on size.
But Sizeo allows retailers and brands—especially apparel and footwear companies—to do so, helping them increase profitability and margin by reducing markdowns and increasing inventory efficiency.
“One of the nuances of the retail business that’s sometimes overlooked is there’s really different size demands based on demographics for different areas,” King said. “I’m sure you’ve seen it in a store where you have three double XLs and no mediums […]. Sizeo gets to help the brands better understand that in this location, there’s going to be a lot of demand for size mediums based on historical demand.”
Companies are starting to see the advantages of more efficiently planning inventory based on size. Sizeo has 10 paying customers with multi-year contracts and a pipeline of prospective customers at various stages between initial conversations, a free trial period and purchase of the product, according to King.
Most other supply chain technology companies aren’t helping retailers and brands determine inventory needs based on size, according to King. In addition, Sizeo’s deployment speed and seamless integration into existing systems set it apart from competitors.
“There’s plenty of sexy businesses that aren’t actually doing anything, and I think this is kind of the opposite of that,” King said. “We’ve built a product that customers wake up to everyday and helps folks solve this problem. We think that’s pretty powerful.”
King also noted that Sizeo’s staff has a substantial amount of experience in retail and supply chain management, something else that sets the startup apart from competitors.
The veterans at Sizeo don’t plan to stop at just helping customers determine inventory needs, though. The startup is talking with current clients and brainstorming to determine ways Sizeo can evolve and further help retailers and brands.
Sizeo hopes to expand its current product to help retailers and brands that sell wholesale product to other retail partners to ensure they’re selling the correct assortment of sizes. King also said Sizeo is looking to build a product that helps find inventory solutions for ecommerce-based companies that have fewer retail stores.
For now, Sizeo is focused on growing the company and bringing in more new customers in addition to building out a product roadmap for the future. King said that after the next 18 months, Sizeo hopes to have attracted enough new customers to start focusing on rolling out more new products and features.
“We’re in size today, and we’re going to use that as a beachhead to kind of continue to roll out products that brands and retailers want,” King said. “We think there’s a lot of ways to provide a lot of value to brands and retailers other than size. Whether that’s at the attribute level or local domain level, we think there’s a lot of corollaries to that.”
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