Gratis, A Leading Beauty and Personal Care Retailer, Captured 5% Incremental Sales by Reducing Lost Sales

The Gratis customer success story at a glance

Gratis is Turkey’s largest beauty and personal care retailer with more than 650 stores. They offer a wide range of cosmetics, skin care, hair care and personal care products, including private label and exclusive brands. They are a dynamic, scale-up business with growth driven by promotional activity; they can have more than 2000 SKUs on promotion online and across hundreds of stores every week.

Gratis have managed their fast growth alongside maintaining customer experience and protecting profit margins. To help them achieve this, they implemented invent.ai's Demand Forecasting, Store and DC Replenishment Optimization solutions. The solutions are hosted on AWS, allowing Gratis to take advantage of its flexibility and reliability to support its omni-channel retail operations.

invent.ai's sophisticated inventory optimization solutions enabled Gratis to scale-up fast. At the same time, they captured 5% incremental sales by reducing lost sales and days of supply reduced significantly. 

Getting inventory management right really matters to Gratis

An unrelenting focus on effective promotional activity drives strong customer loyalty that is worth millions a year to Gratis. It also means their inventory management is highly complex. Under-ordering means gaps on the shelves, dissatisfied customers and lost sales, while over-ordering creates excess inventory and has major financial implications.

Why Gratis partnered with invent.ai? 

Gratis decided they needed a solution set that would help them to improve their operational efficiency and KPIs, balance product availability with efficient inventory, and ensure their complex promotional campaigns ran smoothly. After evaluating multiple providers, they chose invent.ai as their solution partner on their path to fast-growth.

invent.ai tailored its solutions to fit Gratis’ specific needs. “We started by listening to their challenges and ambitions and customized our solutions to build the most value for Gratis. Now, we work together to continuously innovate and boost their financial performance every day.” says Aret Cilingir, Head of Client Services, invent.ai.

Strengthening promotion planning

By working with invent.ai, Gratis has transformed their ability to predict and fulfill customer demand for its products. This process involves handling huge amounts of data and detailed planning. But, with AI-powered demand forecasting, store replenishment and DC replenishment system, they can manage multiple promotions with pinpoint precision.

Successful retail combines art and science

invent.ai Inventory Optimization platform gives Gratis insightful analysis into past promotions and helps them drive continuous improvements. The solution dashboards and detailed reports enable them to quickly and easily identify which promotions, locations, days and times are best for each target audience.

Following the implementation of the sophisticated inventory optimization solutions, Gratis achieved 5% lost sales reduction and decreased the days of supply significantly. 

Gratis is continuing to grow and adapt

Advanced inventory optimization is also helping Gratis to future-proof their business. As they are growing so rapidly, they need to ensure they can adapt to new supply chain networks smoothly and efficiently.

“Without invent.ai optimizing our inventory operations, it would have been difficult for us to scale-up from 250 to 650 stores so successfully. We work with over 100 suppliers and our operations are promotion-driven so we need to manage this dynamically, alongside long-term product replenishment (where lead times would take up to 8 months).

invent.ai team is always on hand to help us solve issues. They also share our philosophy of continuous innovation. Our partnership with invent.ai is an example of perfect teamwork,” says Erdem Ozcan, Supply Chain Director, Gratis.