ANT USA Inc, Nashua, NH (2026)

03/07/2025

I am thrilled to welcome Theisen's to our Buyers Toolbox AP family!

Theisen’s Home • Farm • Auto is a family-owned retailer dedicated to providing high-quality products for home, farm, auto and outdoor living since 1927. Known for their legendary customer service and deep community roots, Theisen’s is constantly growing to better serve customers across the Midwest. Excitingly, Theisen’s is committed to giving back to the communities they serve through their signature More For Your Community Grant Program, supporting local initiatives and making a lasting impact where it matters most. The company has been growing steadily, adding large-format locations throughout Iowa and Wisconsin. Theisen’s is dedicated to delivering the right products to their customers while maintaining healthy inventory productivity and profitability.

I must say that I LOVE working with family-owned retailers that are focused on the bottom line, get key decision makers involved in our projects and appreciate our close, personal customer support. We bring them unparalleled bang for the buck, plenty of real life experience, and true long-term vision. We do not rely on "risk capital" for success, and neither do our best customers.

Inventory is typically the biggest investment made by any retailer, especially in the time of the “hidden recession” experienced by so many. Merchandise Planning and Open To Buy offer key tools and business processes for a company that combines seasonal buys with plenty of basics, across hundreds of buyer-driven and replenished categories.

Our Buyer's Toolbox AP solution will quickly deliver structured Merchandise Planning, Open To Buy tools and coaching, opportunities for better flow of new Receipts, and a structured approach to help skill up the experienced merchant team in scientific retailing, complementing Theisen's century-deep experience in the business.

Our solution is being implemented conjunction with Horizon Retail Systems, relying on the ERP's data feeds and complementing its' existing reporting and ex*****on functionality

01/08/2025

I am happy to share more exciting news – over the last few weeks we were able to implement a full-blown Buyers Toolbox AP at Shoe Palace, one of the most dynamic multi-branded footwear and apparel retailers today.

Years ago, we recognized that most potential merchandise planning implementations were held back by massive budgetary and infrastructure requirements. We have been working on this problem of delivering full-featured, scalable, industry leading MFP solutions at an affordable price point ever since. That's why we developed our Database As A Service option - to enable every merchant make better decisions in planning and Open To Buy without breaking the budget.

The Shoe Palace implementation (among others) validates this approach. From traditional top-down Merchandise Financial Planning to Store/Style data for key item and assortment planning - all this without the burden of excessive integration or capital expenditure.
Thank you to the Shoe Palace team for being great partners on this journey. And a special thanks to our team who continue to achieve the highest levels of customer service and fastest ROI for our clients.

12/04/2024

I am happy to announce that we have implemented Buyers Toolbox AP for Merchandise Planning and Open To Buy at Runnings Farm and Fleet, to support ongoing growth in business volume and store counts.

Runnings has been growing since its' founding in 1947, and today boasts several dozen large format locations in 8 states including Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa, Montana, New York, New Hampshire and Connecticut.

As a solid, growing family-owned retailer, Runnings is oriented towards profitability, practical inventory improvements and improving Open To Buy Management across an incredibly diverse range of seasonal, replenishment-driven, basic and fashion merchandise.

Runnings selected ANT USA as a partner for our proven track record, long-term outlook and stability, as well as deep experience in Merchandise Planning. Critical to this relationship is ANT USA's ability to transfer planning knowhow and help coach the buying staff in core Merchandise Planning methods and techniques.

This planning system implementation is being carried out in collaboration with Horizon Retail Solutions - a leading supplier of Retail ERP to Farm, Home and Ranch retailers. In the course of our partnership, Horizon has built a reusable, scalable and standardized data interface to help expedite this and future joint system implementations.

Our flagship product – Buyers Toolbox AP fit the bill with best-in-class functionality, ease of use, a rapid implementation methodology and an affordable price point.

On a personal note, I am really enjoying doing the work with such a team of nice, practical, results-oriented merchants.

11/26/2024

The everyday variety of Merchandise Planning methods and techniques out there is really FUN to deal with!

Just this past Friday, I was lucky (and challenged) to use our Buyers Toolbox in a few distinct business process variations:

1. Item Planning: a furniture and appliance chain with hundreds of stores is focused on detailed, bottom-up Item-level Unit Planning: Forecasting sales demand for individual Items, balancing their assortment and share contribution within individual collections, and optimizing incoming Receipt needs by week. I helped them figure out how to create new KPIs for forecasting future Stock positions, taking into account Backorders, Open POs and shipment delays - then instantly compare to stock service levels, enabling close management and tweaking of Vendor PO delivery dates. That took a couple of hours of user interviewing and formula writing...

2) Financial Planning: a large national footwear and apparel chain has been trying to figure out how to prorate the value of FUTURE planned Perm and POS markdowns that matches Finance Dept projection. Looks like a mix of MD Stock to Total Stock can help w proration of Perm MD $, and some form of Stock IMU blended w Sales, Selling Price compared to Original Price - can help there. A real head-scratcher, but looks feasible. That took at least an hour. More formulas and data elements being added to their live Store/Week/Style database...

3) Vendor Planning and Reporting: another customer - a large Farm and Fleet chain in the Midwest has added Vendor/Brand level data to their Toolbox database, and we worked on adding Vendor planning methods to their existing Category/Comp-NonComp, not to mention report automation, OP to NY forecast data migration and more. That took at least an hour...

I was blessed to have worked all day with Planners who are nice, do the work, and appreciate the impact.

Each solution required its' own blend of user interviewing and needs discovery, retail industry knowledge, and creative problem-solving. It's like solving a complex, interlocking puzzle every time. Live, while people are watching.

What fascinates me most is how these elements interconnect. A slight adjustment in unit planning can ripple through to vendor relationships and financial projections. It's a delicate balance of art and science, where data-driven decisions meet intuition honed by years of experience.

Planning Planning Planning Forecasting Forecasting

11/19/2024

Too many merchants still plan their budgets and Open To Buy once a season, if not once a year. Surely, planning is a chore, an expense, and there are so many other, more important things to take care of... Besides, the buyers often don't follow the plan - so what's the point of trying hard?

1. Consumer and Brand volatility. A brand that's hot today, could be a real dog by the end of the season. A category could catch fire because of weather, superior vendor lineup or simply better buying. No trend line assumption survives a few months of trending - you will either have guessed too high, or too low. And you will end up with either not enough stock, or too much stock to deal with.

2. Economic volatility. This is obviously in play right now. MANY of our discounter and basic goods retailer clients are suffering from decreased transaction size and shrinking shopper baskets. I have seen decreases of as much as 10-15% in comp sales, as the value consumer simply doesn't have enough spendable cash in their pocket. Will this trend continue? God forbid! What comes down MUST come up, or else... When will this turn? How closely are you watching your sales forecasts and resulting OTB?

3. How nimble are you? For a lot of merchants, sales forecasting is the foundation of all future projection. Do you forecast your sales monthly or weekly? Quarterly or once a season? That's actually NOT the important question at hand. It's how often do you REFORECAST, that helps you stay on course with volatile trends and unexpected trading patterns.

4. Short lifecycle products. Seasonal categories can have a sales curve that's as little as 2-3 months. How do you deal with that curve if you plan once a season? Catalogue companies have designed a practical answer. They create a predicted demand curve (sales plan) by week, and monitor actual performance vs plan in the first one or two weeks after a catalog drop. The total sales forecast is then adjusted up or down depending on the early actuals vs plan.

5. Vendor and supply chain volatility. Is there a massive past due OnOrder that you may be hoping will arrive in time (or sometimes hoping you don't need it to begin with)? Are you taking in those vendor receipts even though your sales are not meeting expectations? That's one good way to end up clearing excess stock at the end of the season... To be fair, how would you notice that impending overhang of inventory - without timely reforecasting?

6. Better tools lead to better outcomes. Many of our customers have adopted math-based long range sales forecasting. One can quickly get sales reforecasted (or even seeded for future manual planning) out as far as the end of Next Year. Being able to reforecast sales enables adjusting Open To Buy in time for the buyers to react to all that predictably unpredictable volatility.

Implementing timely OTB guidance based on frequent reforecasting isn't just good practice—it's a competitive necessity.

11/15/2024

As we approach the holiday season, retailers face the crucial task of managing end-of season excess inventory. Here are a few practical tips on making sure you don't end up with a mountain of clearance stock in January on a category-by-category or key vendor basis:

1. Review your sales forecasts for the next eight weeks, and make sure that they reflect true sales trends actualized since the onset of the cold(er) season, based on sales data from mid-September or early October as compared to prior year(s).

2. Decide how much inventory you want to realistically END the year with - that will give you a good starting point for planning next year buys, and suggest the optimal amount of vendor receipts you may need over the holiday season.

3. Immediately focus on your Past Due OnOrder - review your outstanding orders NOW, to make sure that what you still have coming in is appropriate to your likely forecasted/target receipts.

4. Consider the timing of late (incoming) vendor receipts - make sure your FUTURE outstanding OnOrder is timed to actually hit the stores or the ecomm warehouse early enough to be able to sell through them. If not, try canceling some orders. Backloading Receipts is one of the most common planning/forecasting mistakes that leaves far too many merchants holding the bag by January 1

5. Review your forecasted inventory by channel and/or store, to make sure your inventory mix matches your sales mix. Too many units get stuck in places where they are not needed - and even on the shelf in the warehouse or DC

6. Consider that you will likely get a ton of customer returns after the holidays, and those will settle onto your inventory as dead weight. Try to estimate what percentage of such returns are going to be sellable, and whether that might reduce your holiday vendor receipt needs.

6. The Early Markdown Gets the Sale -don't wait until too late. Studies have shown that taking judicious markdowns while consumer demand is (still) strong tends to reduce the overall markdown amount needed to move excess inventory. Try to determine optimal timing and depth of markdowns, potentially increasing sell-through rates by as much as 20%.

Finally - remember, the goal is to have a clean(er) stock position at the end of the holidays, which should give you more OTB freedom and fresher stock for Q1 trading.

What do you think? Any and all comments (especially disagreements and challenges) would be most welcome here...

ANT USA Inc

03/07/2025

01/08/2025

12/04/2024

11/26/2024

11/19/2024

11/15/2024

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