Introduction – The Warehouse

With over 80 stores, a team from New Zealand’s largest retailer, The Warehouse, sat down with us to share their experience using EDITED. 

The Warehouse is a general merchandise store with a wide range of products, including apparel, home goods, tech, beauty, and stationery. Its purpose is to help New Zealand families live better every day. The team focuses on offering affordable, quality essentials and seasonal fashion across women’s, men’s, and kid’s apparel. 

As New Zealand is a relatively small market with the challenge of geographical distance, the team utilizes EDITED as a window into the world of global retail insights. In the age of social media, customers are global citizens, and this view is paramount to staying relevant and competitive. 

A Window Into the World

In terms of the brand’s apparel business, The Warehouse team shared that they are relentlessly focussing their strategy to win back “mums” and young women in general, which means working hard to update the mix and appeal of their range. 

To boost its strategy, The Warehouse uses EDITED’s Retail Intelligence Platform. Abigail McEwan, Lead Apparel Buyer (Women’s, Men’s, Children’s Apparel), at The Warehouse, explains: 

“EDITED gives our buyers the support to shift their ranges into the right categories and make the right color choices. The tool gives them confidence going into presentations to the company with data to back up their decisions, helping them to take action and move forward. It is a conversation starter and a conversation stopper.” 

Accessing this real-time data through EDITED allows The Warehouse team to make quick-fire decisions when planning or adjusting in-season, next season, or next year. These insights empower their commitment to serving the community by giving the team the confidence through data to provide customers with the styles they want. 

Shifting Strategy

After the disruption of COVID, The Warehouse’s approach to its assortment strategy was cautious. However, by summer 2023, its customer insights indicated that the brand was missing excitement in its ranges. The Warehouse proactively managed this feedback using EDITED to help evaluate and compare trends with competitors.

The Warehouse team had to perform a comp shop of their entire market in only 48 hours. Using EDITED, they had the ability to filter all of their local competitors and the exact product types they were researching to create a single-page snapshot of performance. 

Additionally, with the price option dashboard, the team could identify every competing price across each range and pinpoint precisely where they needed to adjust. 

Abigail said, “The fact that you can generate this pricing and assortment information for a category in about 10-15 minutes continues to amaze me.” 

The EDITED dashboards have supported The Warehouse in understanding where categories are shifting, having clear conversations, and making strategic changes driven by data to optimize pricing and assortments. 

The team successfully achieved 77% acceptance of the changes they recommended, backed by EDITED data. With the support of EDITED, this depth and breadth of insight in a short time frame helped the team validate their decisions with data and feel confident they were making the right choices for all stakeholders. 

Marina de Wet, Domain Chapter Lead Group Buying & Design at The Warehouse, says, “EDITED has been critical for several reasons. One is that we can customize the tool to our needs and integrate it into our ways of working. Another is that it gives us an outside perspective and is dynamic. You can discuss a point and simply look at a selection of the EDITED data, either globally or locally, and have the data to back it up almost immediately.” 

From Thinking to Knowing – Looking Ahead to Summer 2025

Using EDITED, The Warehouse can evaluate at a category level and deep dive into range reviews. These metrics supported the team to make quick-fire decisions by visualizing their own and competitor data in one place. 

These historical and real-time insights helped The Warehouse shift its category mix and re-strategize the dress assortment for the upcoming season. 

Conclusion

The Warehouse is able to stay relevant and cater to its customers by harnessing the real-time insights EDITED’s Retail Intelligence Platform provides. 

EDITED helps The Warehouse compare global and local best practices with tailored visualization of data and insights. Partnering with EDITED, the team has the confidence to use better data and insights to make better decisions, from responding dynamically to market shifts like post-COVID, to proactively managing their strategy and planning for the upcoming season.

“EDITED gives you instant clarity and visibility. You can move from decisions that affect ‘now’ to the next season or to new seasons. EDITED allows you to deep dive where you need by giving you the top line view and highlighting opportunities to deep dive later. This platform is the perfect blend of art and science and ensures that we upskill to remain future fit as retailers. ” 

– Marina de Wet 

The Warehouse continues to leverage EDITED to make informed decisions, stay relevant in the market, and give its customers affordable everyday essentials, and seasonal fashion across its categories.