We're Still Not Done With This Table, Are We?

We've spent nearly a week studying one simple table. One week!!

Remember:

• Category 11 is the Sun in the Category Solar System.
• Categories 6/7 are Major Planets.
• Category 10 behaves like a Comet, not interacting a ton with other Categories (based on what we've witnessed thus far).

"% New Merch" represents the share of sales last year within the Category that came from items that were new in the past year. Let's look at our four key Categories.

• 39.6% of Category 6 sales come from items new in the past year.
• 8.0% of Category 7 sales come from items new in the past year.
• 4.6% of Category 10 sales come from items new in the past year.
• 13.0% of Category 11 sales come from items new in the past year.

The product development folks appear to be losing their battle. They are developing several Categories (2/3/4/6/8/9). But only one of the four key Categories is being developed.

Having worked on a ton of this stuff over the past decade, it is generally true that if you fail to develop new products/merchandise/items today, you will have a sales problem tomorrow.

In these projects, I'd need to have a discussion with the CEO or Chief Merchant, in order to understand what the logic is for Categories 7/10/11. In a separate analysis, I observed that sales of new items in Categories 7/10 are down about 35% over the past three years ... whereas sales of new items in Category 11 are actually growing year-over-year. There are always subtleties in this work. Dig in and figure out what is going on.

Interested in having me run a Category Development Project for you? Project pricing and file layouts can be found here.