Retail boutique database
We are constantly improving our retailer boutique database by adding new brands, new features and more history.
Started in 2015, it soon evolved in the collaboration with Exane BNP Paribas research entitled “Retail Network Monitor” where luxury brands are tracked by the continuously evolving physical store presence worldwide. Today more details are available for luxury goods analysts
Alternative Data Sources
Brands store locators are a very powerful tool to leverage on, when it comes to monitoring a physical store network of a brand. This has proved to be better than initially expected: it is in fact in brand’s best interest to keep their store locators functional, up to date and reliable. They communicate to their customers where the stores are. Brands invest quite an amount of capital in maintaining their retail network attractive, and drive sales through their directly operated stores (DOS) as opposed to multibrand wholesale stores.
This doesn’t off course mean they always keep it clean, but we have noticed big improvements since we started sharing this data with industry analysts. There have been several calls with brand’s management that shared with us, they made store locators more reliable. It’s an ongoing process, a virtuous cycle. In a certain way we feel we contributed to a more transparent and efficient distribution of information in the industry.
Standardized features
Obviously there have been several data quality issues we had to go through. For instance, there are no reporting standards applicable to store locators. Geography had to be recalculated, to provide structured and unified information about region, country, city and addresses.
Particularly helpful proved to be the indication of the local currency, in which the stores operate. This gives a very clear overview of the exposure of a brand to a specific currency.
Some include only directly operated stores (DOS) excluding authorized retailers, or list shop-in-shops and corners, while excluding those from financial communication. Some store locators are across multiple brands, some are dedicated. There were even cases (i.e. Folli Follie) where the right figure was from the store locator, and the questioned one was from financial reports.
We tried to uniform all of this into a single, structured flow of data presented in an excel file, to ease access and further analysis.