Real-time assortment for multi-store Home Improvement.
Store-level assortment signals, caught before they compound into margin loss.
Why assortment matters
in home retail.
The top 2,000 SKUs generate the bulk of revenue, but the remaining 48,000 are what makes you a project destination. Drop a niche fitting and you lose the entire project basket. Ward identifies which tail SKUs are project-basket anchors worth keeping and which are truly dead weight that should be rationalized.
Benchmarks. Home improvement long-tail SKUs (the bottom 60-70% of catalog by velocity) typically generate 8-15% of standalone revenue but anchor 25-35% of project basket value. Pro customers depend disproportionately on the tail, losing tail items typically costs 2-4x the standalone revenue impact in Pro retention.
Long-tail rationalization, plumbing department
Plumbing carries thousands of SKUs, hundreds with zero sales in 90 days. Ward's project basket analysis reveals that many of those "dead" SKUs appear alongside high-velocity project items, a specialty elbow fitting with minimal standalone sales is still critical to a complete project basket. Deleting it sends the customer to a competitor for the entire job. Ward separates true orphaned SKUs from project-basket anchors and recommends cutting only the former.
Three pitfalls Ward catches
in home assortment.
- 01 SKU rationalization based on standalone velocity destroys project-basket anchors and drives customers to competitors for the entire job, net assortment economics turn negative.
- 02 Pro account purchasing patterns differ from DIY in tail-SKU dependency; cutting "dead" specialty fasteners hurts Pro retention more than DIY revenue.
- 03 Seasonal activation cycles mean a SKU "dead" for 9 months can be critical for 3; chain-wide 90-day velocity cuts kill seasonal anchors prematurely.
How Ward runs assortment
for home retailers.
-
01
Build the project basket affinity graph
Ward analyzes 18 months of basket data to identify which low-velocity SKUs anchor multi-SKU project baskets and which are truly orphan.
-
02
Score SKUs on project anchor value
Each tail SKU is scored on its basket-anchor contribution per Pro and DIY segment, separating true dead weight from undervalued anchors.
-
03
Rationalize only the orphans
Cards recommend cuts only on SKUs with low standalone velocity AND low project-anchor contribution, preserving the catalog depth that makes the chain a project destination.
What a Ward card looks like.
Chat
Ask anything. Ward routes to the right agent and returns cited answers.
I pulled the spring pre-build against the last three seasons and the weather signal for the 22 Southeast stores.
| Signal | Finding |
|---|---|
seasonal_prebuild | Mulch on-hand hit 61% of plan the week temps broke 70°F |
dc_push | DC push started 9 days after the first-warm-week trigger, LY it was 2 |
attach.project | Soil and edging attach fell 18% at stores that gapped on mulch |
Recommend: tie the push trigger to the 10-day forecast instead of the calendar week, pre-position two truckloads at the 8 stores that gapped, and re-set the attach endcap.
seasonal_prebuild…
Dashboards
Pinned views built from saved data-lake queries.
Sources
Connect external systems to the data lake.
| Name | Type | Last sync |
|---|---|---|
epicor_pos_transactions | import | 2m ago |
epicor_special_orders | import | 2m ago |
netsuite_inventory_snapshot | import | 14m ago |
retail_seasonal_prebuild | import | 1h ago |
retail_sku_velocity | import | 1h ago |
retail_pro_account_sales | import | 1h ago |
retail_weather_daily | import | 1h ago |
Policies
Browse and manage Cedar access policies for your tenant.
| Policy ID | Effect | Resources |
|---|---|---|
merch-read-default | permit | Model::* |
pro-team-read-accounts | permit | Model::"pro_account_sales" |
vendor-blocked | forbid | Model::"labor_*" |
supply-read-orders | permit | Model::"special_orders" |
Home assortment:
the shift.
- ×Project basket identification
- ×Seasonal pre-positioning
- ×Long-tail inventory
- ✓Store cluster segmentation
- ✓SKU rationalization recommendations
- ✓Whitespace opportunity detection
Home KPI impact.
Ward requires 6\u201312 months to baseline seasonal categories. Pro vs DIY segment separation is critical for accurate modeling.
Questions about home assortment.
The top 2,000 SKUs generate the bulk of revenue, but the remaining 48,000 are what makes you a project destination. Drop a niche fitting and you lose the entire project basket.
Plumbing carries thousands of SKUs, hundreds with zero sales in 90 days. Ward's project basket analysis reveals that many of those "dead" SKUs appear alongside high-velocity project items, a specialty elbow fitting with minimal standalone sales is still critical to a complete project basket.
Ward tracks long-tail project basket affinity, Pro vs DIY assortment dependency, seasonal SKU activation cycles, and revenue-per-linear-foot by department and planogram section.
First assortment insight cards arrive within 48 hours. Stable home baselines form within two weeks.
More Home insight cards.
Home retailers: see what assortment problems Ward catches.
Root causes, not just alerts. See it on your data.
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Find out what your data has been hiding.
Tell us about your operation. We’ll show you the problems Ward catches, and the ones your current tools miss.