How brands report on their new SKUs today

This time of year, particularly for beauty brands, there’s a close eye on how retail partners are selling through their limited edition sets.

These SKUs are great for driving new customer acquisition during the biggest gifting period of the year, but it can be a nightmare to balance demand so that it doesn’t sell out too quick or slow.

📊 To make these decisions, in most cases there’s a spreadsheet emailed internally each Monday that compiles data from each set and retailer, with units sold for the week, and the initial quantity sold in.

But this spreadsheet is usually an overwhelming experience for teams to take action on.

Why? Because the data is manually populated without context of HOW it needs to be acted on in each team.

For instance:
▶️ Brand teams need to understand the broader SKU trend to decide what activity to take, while being considerate to brand perception of any discounts.
▶️ Commercial teams need to monitor retailer and regional inventory to reduce overstocks and sellouts
▶️ Regional / field teams need to know how their group of stores are performing (and if they’re overtaking their colleagues in other regions!)

4 ways to make limited edition sets reports more actionable

❓ So what’s a better way? What features should a sets sellthrough tracker have (or any report for that matter?)

1️⃣ Clear: Use the 5 second rule - does it take longer than this to interpret the page? Then you’ve lost your audience! Ruthlessly strip out as much as you can from the report and only include metrics that can be acted on. Hide the granular metrics for deeper dive views (PowerBI is great for this using tooltips and toggles)

2️⃣ Relatable: Is that metric good or bad? Benchmarks are key here to help frame the performance. Adding a constant line to charts is a good way to achieve this.

3️⃣ Relevant: How can each team review in their own context? I like to create a set of product toggles on one side, and account toggles on the other. This is where interactive dashboards stands out, because a click on one side, filters the other side. Eg like the account manager filter in the screenshot, which filters to the individual sets performance in that region.

4️⃣ Timely: How quickly can you make these decisions on a Monday? It all comes down to how streamlined your reports are. I like to populate each retailer file into a shared internal folder, and automatically clean up in the refresh using PowerBI, so that the report is visible in a few minutes.

📈 So instead of the Monday morning spreadsheet dread, let’s make reports like these an easy, collaborative decision, so teams can make better decisions from their point of view.

If you want to see more of how this demo dashboard works, just reach out