How would you describe Nextail in a single tweet?
Nextail is a smart platform for fashion merchandising that predicts localized demand to automate data-driven decisions. With AI and advanced analytics, global retailers are transforming their core merchandising processes, boosting operational agility and increasing margins.
How did it all start and why?
During my time as Head of European Operations for Inditex, and then later, as an advisor to international retailers, I kept seeing the same issue again and again: the processes and tech behind core stock management weren’t meeting the needs of today’s merchandisers. They were just too slow and too static, forcing retailers to react to, and not predict, customer demand.
This often led to frustrated customers who couldn’t find what they were looking for and worsening margins for retailers.
I was inspired to reinvigorate retail through data and AI because I understood that they could completely transform merchandising by automating the very complex and time consuming decision-making that are fundamental to success. And that’s how the idea of creating Nextail came about in October, 2014.
What have you achieved so far?
Nextail has just passed the five-year mark, and we’re proud to have come so far in such a relatively short time. We continue to gain traction as the industry becomes conscious of the real need for Nextail. We’re proud to be working with more than 30 great retail brands, including Versace, River Island, and Pepe Jeans, among others.
In 2014, Nextail was a five-person startup. Just two years later, we had already made it onto the CB Insights list of “Startups transforming retail” and we were presented with two awards at the 2017 edition of South Summit: ‘Best Lifestyle & Fashion Startup’ and ‘Best Startup Team’.
And a huge milestone was raising our Series A funding in the spring of 2018, which has fast-tracked our business growth. Just last year, we were thrilled to be nominated for the 2019 LVMH innovation award.
Today, just as Nextail the solution continues to grow stronger to address even more complex retail needs, so has Nextail the team. The latter is built by a strong, ambitious, and growing team of nearly 100 Nextailers in Spain, the US, France, Italy, and Russia, supporting the agile transformation of our customers all over the world.
What do you plan to achieve in the next 2-3 years?
Our goals are lofty, and we’re ready.
The fashion retail industry is looking for a solution like ours and needs a quick, supportive, external partner who can help them transform retailers into agile retailers who are faster, more sustainable, and can access data-driven decisions. And we want to be that partner.
Not only will we continue identifying major retailers that can seriously benefit from our solution, we will also continue looking for new ways to add value to the brands we already work with at scale. We’ll be adding even more sophisticated functionality based on how we anticipate the needs of retail changing and through constant inspiration from our customers.
Global spending on AI services for retail is expected to reach $12 billion by 2023, with more than 325,000 retailers adopting this technology by then. Since AI allows retailers to automate core operational processes that are normally manual, time consuming, and inefficient instead of manual work, store staff can dedicate time directly to customers, acting as better brand ambassadors, and bringing humanity back to retail, and HQ staff has more bandwidth for improving their commercial knowledge.
On the other hand, since retailers can accurately anticipate localized demand at SKU, size, and store level, they can lessen store coverage which becomes even more relevant when dealing with online and physical channels. In essence, they sell more with less stock. We believe that knowing exactly how much stock is actually needed can work its way up the supply chain, helping retailers to produce and use stock more responsibly.
Looking toward the future, we also plan to continue educating ourselves and the industry about how advanced retail technology can make the retail world a better place, and then help brands get there.
