Frequently Asked Questions

General Questions

What problem does EDITED solve?

EDITED brings data into decision-making every day, enabling its customers to be global, competitive players. People in buying and merchandising teams within retail businesses dictate the entire productivity of the business, but have never had a market-facing business intelligence platform before. The current methods used by retail brands are very outdated, which has historically relied on guesswork and manual comp shopping to make product, design, supply chain and pricing decisions. EDITED eliminates this guesswork by giving retailers real, factual numbers to support every decision to minimize overstocking, streamline supply chains and accurately identify assortment. 

What does EDITED do?

EDITED is a Retail Decision Platform. Our software helps the world’s best brands and retailers drive sales by eliminating guesswork. The software is used by buyers, planners and trading teams to generate a huge competitive advantage by deciding what products to make, how to price them and when to discount. Industry leaders use EDITED everyday to understand and compare competitor prices, discounts, product ranges and trends. This helps them merchandise and stock products accordingly, resulting in higher revenues and reduced discounting rates mandated by overstock.

What’s EDITED’s ROI?

Customers of the platform have seen an average lift in revenue of over 8% YoY when using EDITED to inform their product, pricing, assortment, and supply chain strategies. In addition, the average EDITED customer sees gains of 15% YoY when using the platform extensively.

How many data points does EDITED track?

2 billion + SKUs

How many retailers and brands does EDITED track?

90,000 retailers and brands tracked

How does EDITED collect and track data?

EDITED uses crawlers to monitor all information on a retailer’s website. EDITED live tracks every commercial trend worldwide and gives brands and retailers the performance insight you need to buy in with confidence, at the right time. Or get out before deep discounting sets in.

How does a retailer integrate EDITED into their company system?

EDITED is entirely web-based and runs directly out of a web browser. Retailers do not have to install, integrate or update anything.

What are the company profiles of EDITED’s customers?

EDITED works with more than half of the world’s top 10 apparel brands. Our customers come from all retail segments, from mass market to luxury – including Topshop, Puma, Tommy Hilfiger, Zara, Margiela and many others. Customers range across six continents in countries such as Canada, Germany, Italy, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, the UK and US.

Who are EDITED’s competitors?

Our biggest competitor is retailers doing the work manually themselves in-house, or using external agencies to compile a manual competitor shop once or twice a year. The traditional, manual process is laced with inaccuracies, and even humans with the best of intentions and skill, can’t do this nearly as well or as fast as machines.

How can retailers maintain a competitive advantage in retail today?

The challenge facing many brands today is how to spot trends as they’re developing and how to capitalize commercially. Optimized supply chains mean retailers can get top performing products in front of customers quicker than ever. But as trends become trans-seasonal and product drops are more frequent, knowing which products to push only becomes harder when looking across multiple categories at hundreds of competitors and over several channels. That’s where the power of data lies. Manual comp shops can’t gather or process that volume and detail of information. Retailers need to be armed with a business intelligence tool to identify the right products. Since the EDITED Retail Decision Platform tracks over 2 billion products, it is the unmatched market facing platform that helps these brands and retailers plan, price and promote products effectively.

Business Questions

What is the total amount EDITED raised so far?

EDITED raised $5 million in equity capital from London-based firms Frog Capital and Index Ventures.

How many brands and retailers use EDITED? 

The EDITED Retail Decision Platform is used by over 200 leading brands and retailers worldwide to optimize their buying and merchandising decisions. 

Where did the idea of EDITED come from? 

EDITED began with our co-founder’s own realization that the industry lacked the deep insights she needed when she was a fashion designer. 

Who primarily uses EDITED? 

EDITED is primarily used by buying and merchandising teams including the trading or planning team. These are the main groups of people within retail who make all strategic commercial decisions. C-suite and financial teams use EDITED to plan their go-to-market strategy for maximizing company profitability. From a product planning and communication approach, EDITED is often used by design and e-commerce teams, respectively. We sell to retail management through to CEOs.

How much does EDITED cost to retailers? 

Since each retailer has a different set of problem areas EDITED can solve, contact one of our product specialists here to learn more about our different packages and offers. 

What is the current state of the retail market?

Fashion retail is a trillion-dollar industry where one good decision can make you millions and a bad one can cost you just as much. The retail market has become very competitive in all aspects.

Retail is one of the largest industries in the world after airlines, finance and insurance, all of which have long supported decision-making with data. The methods used by apparel retail brands are very outdated, and EDITED eliminates the guesswork that comes with relying on fashion forecasting by giving retailers real, factual numbers to support every decision.

What makes the EDITED platform essential to the retail market? 

Between the retail apocalypse and the impending aftershocks of the coronavirus, the retail industry is experiencing an unprecedented level of uncertainty coupled on top of a critical need for speed. Sped up fashion trends and a change in consumer discovery of products have disrupted all roles within this industry. Merchandisers have new challenges and added pressures layered on top of their traditional numbers-focused and spreadsheet-driven roles. There is also a higher demand for quicker and better decision making as production cycles have shortened. Competition within the retail industry will continue to grow tremendously especially as retailers place a greater focus on their e-commerce strategies. In order to service these needs, EDITED delivers a real-time business intelligence analytics product to serve global customers by providing localized insights to give retailers a competitive edge.

Why does discounting happen? What are the factors that could influence effective markdown strategies? How does EDITED data help to reduce this? 

Retailers miscalculate how much to discount because they fail to include factors like timing, product type, category and popularity. EDITED gives retailers a holistic view of the market to understand a trend’s demand before they even put a style into production, which helps buyers know how many orders to place. Then real-time analysis of competitors and other market segments helps merchandisers track a trend’s performance, spot saturation and clear stock before a decline. With EDITED, retailers are able to identify patterns, make more insightful decisions to get their discounting approach right and retain millions of dollars. 

Retail Questions

Does EDITED track details about in-store merchandise? 

Retailers have gone omnichannel. What’s in stores is also what’s online –  because it has to be. Customers won’t tolerate browsing in one place and not being able to buy in the other. This self-balance act means that what EDITED shows you is the real market anywhere in the world. And if we don’t, we’re always happy to work with our customers to add crawlers specific to their needs. 

Do people need to have an analytical background in order to read EDITED’s data? 

Our data team augments and restructures the numbers and puts them into a real-world context so our users can better understand the data. Simply put, we turn data points into pictures, charts, graphs, etc. Visual contextualization allows you to easily create pricing structures or analyze replenishment rates to give you the insights needed to guide your commercial decisions. Our team of experts and their ability to augment the immense quantity of data sets EDITED apart from being another collection of web crawlers. Our mission is to demystify the difficulties of implementing and using a business intelligence market-facing tool. Similar to other consumer facing platforms, the EDITED Retail Decision Platform is easy to roll out into any business and simple to use. 

Does EDITED track stock data? 

EDITED doesn’t track stock data, as this is private information owned by each retailer or brand. However, each product page includes indicators of how each product is performing in the market and its history. 

Can EDITED help retailers boost margins while avoiding heavy discounting?

Some discounting is healthy and necessary, but in recent years too many retailers have placed a long-term dependence on markdowns. It’s a tactic aimed at securing deal-savvy customers, but ultimately one that dilutes brand value, erodes consumer confidence and damages sensitive margins. Increasing full price sell-through by strengthening a brand is a key focus for sales and growth of some businesses. Rebuilding brand means getting back to full-price. Doing so relies on being able to offer the right product to their core customer and educating them on the value in the price point. To do that, brands and retailers need to understand exactly what connects in their market, which is something the EDITED retail data can reveal.

Does EDITED determine how much stock to invest in? 

Excess inventory is an issue all retailers face. The rapid expansion of online retail over the past fifteen years has resulted in an abundance of choice for consumers, paralyzing decision-making and halting sales. Retailers need to reconsider their assortment, ensuring every part of it fits a purpose and fulfills a need, especially as sustainability becomes a primary concern for consumers. Delivering the right product means knowing your customer inside out. Leveraging big data is critical to this, where the EDITED Retail Decision Platform tracks in real-time what products resonate with a brand’s customer, how it is communicated to them, as well as a competitor analysis. 

COVID-19 Questions

How can EDITED help during COVID-19? 

EDITED was ultimately created to help retailers win and optimize retail decision-making using data, automation and A.I. Using data to make smart and strategic decisions has never been more critical than in times of crisis and uncertainty. Between hands-on support from our Customer Success team to analytical reports from our Analyst team, EDITED has built strategies and processes to help retailers navigate these times and to offer tactical support to help with the supply and demand side of your business. 

What are some of the core issues and solutions retailers can keep in mind while dealing with the impacts of COVID-19?

Retailers need to be strategic with their assortment strategy and tighten their operational processes. Retailers who succeed are going to be the ones who can quickly downsize their orders and operations, and upshift when the markets recover. They can use A.I. and data from EDITED to uncover the true needs of local markets in order to help make the process of tightening operations clearer. 

Retailers need to rethink their supply chain and create agile practices. To survive, retailers need to invest in technology that can shorten lead times, improve sustainable practices and automate the currently manual process of checking the quality and fit of samples. 

Retailers need to be smart about their pricing and discounting strategy as there’s no current end date to this pandemic. With real-time retail data, retailers can analyze the market and adjust their strategies accordingly to avoid a lack of supply. 

Retailers need to maintain an aura of newness with the limitations they are now facing. By using the EDITED Retail Decision Platform, retailers can understand what are optimal colors, fit and shape they should be reusing and reinvesting in to ensure that they don’t lose their current market share with their key demographics. 

Retailers need to evolve their marketing strategy by being transparent about the challenges they’re facing in order to minimize long-term damage to brand loyalty. 

Tech Questions

How does EDITED’s product work?

The EDITED Retail Decision Platform uses big data, artificial intelligence and image/text recognition to track the global apparel retail market in real time. As a web-based application, it does not require integration from I.T. and users can hit the ground running to deliver immediate value. Retailers are able to sell more products with less discounting, understand competitor pricing, have correct product assortments and minimize gaps, spot key trends early and capitalize on them with maximum efficiency. EDITED software monitors and understands all publicly available information from websites and newsletters of brands and retailers from around the world.

Where do EDITED’s data points come from?

Like Google, EDITED crawls the web where we gather and analyze more than 1 billion products online in over 130 countries, adding more than 1.5 million every week. Retailers can analyze the numbers behind trends and trace every single data point back to its original source, giving them a clear view into actual performance.

How does EDITED define ‘data point’?

A ‘data point’ is a product as it exists at a certain point in time. For example, if we take a dress found at 7:01 p.m. on August 7, our system captures that dress online and converts it into a data point. Contained within the data point are all the details about that dress, things like color options, price, drop dates and so on. Every single detail about a product contributes to the formation of one complete data point.

Our system then finds the same product the next day and assembles its details to form another data point. If the first and second data points are not identical, the system knows to alert us to what has changed. Maybe it is no longer available in size medium, for example. We’d record that event in the product’s timeline. If two days later the data point shows that the medium is back in stock, we’d record that too. Therefore, we see and record every slight change to a product over time, so we know everything about it.

All data points are rendered visually, so that all the relevant information about the dress or any other aspect of the assortment can be easily read versus just reading a pile of numbers. And because the dress’ data points are collected daily, we can track the evolution of the product over time.

For a single dress, it may take capturing hundreds of details to form a complete data point. EDITED compiles each of these details every day, and shows how each has changed over time. It does that for 376 million other products, comprising more than 506 million SKUs.

In this way we actually break down the entire global apparel retail industry every day and send it streaming back to our offices for processing. It’s by reconstructing these data points, totaling nearly seven million per day, that we’re able to begin building a real-time view of your market regardless of segment or country.

How does EDITED contextualize data?

Our software team augments and restructures the numbers and puts them into a real-world context so people can better understand the data. Simply put, we turn data points into pictures, charts, graphs, etc. Visual contextualization allows you to easily create pricing structures or analyze replenishment rates to give you the insights needed to guide your commercial decisions. Our team of experts, and their ability to augment the immense quantity of data, sets EDITED apart from being just another collection of web crawlers.

What are crawlers and how does EDITED use them?

In the same way that Google uses machine learning to build crawlers that can read websites and understand all the publicly available information from them, EDITED uses crawlers to read the sites of brands and retailers all over the world. By using advanced machine learning, we’ve taught our systems to understand the data collected. In this way, our systems can do things like determine when a skirt is not a dress. Or when a tunic is not a shirt. It does this with near mathematical perfection for every product on the market.

Who handles all this data?

Our data team consists of 25+ people who collect all this data and bring it to life on screen. Additionally, our in-house Analyst team has decades of combined industry experience. They analyze the market and use the platform to prepare reports on everything from trends to category performance market-wide, all backed up with EDITED data.

How does EDITED use machine learning?

EDITED uses image recognition which means recognizing a piece of clothing within an image and separating it from non-essential elements, i.e. the model wearing the clothes. Literally, chopping off arms, legs and heads to single out the item you want to see. As a means of double-checking itself, our systems also read the item’s name, description and meta description to make sure the words correspond to what is in the image.

How was EDITED built?

EDITED is built in-house by data scientists and engineers working alongside former buyers and merchandisers from global brands and retailers — making it precisely tailored to the needs of its customers.