Retail Math: Understanding the Numbers that Drive Success

Retail is an exciting, challenging, and fast-paced career choice.  Merchandising is the engine that drives the business.  The ability to understand merchandising & buying metrics is essential to success and those metrics are covered in great detail here.  This course goes a step further, taking a cross-functional view including store operations, finance, accounting, and loss prevention to explore strategic concepts and the big picture of how the metrics tell a story.  The instructor is known for using well-paced lectures and clear illustrations featuring examples and lessons learned over a decade in leadership roles.  The course is ideal for those who are new to retail or who are experienced but never received an in-depth explanation of the key metrics and strategic concepts.  Additionally this is great knowledge for any recruiter who needs to understand retail terminology in order to effectively interview candidates.

The high level topics include:

• Merchandising formulas and concepts

• Pricing strategies explained

• Loss prevention formulas and concepts

• Finance & accounting retail relevant topics

• Store operations key metrics

Course includes downloadable materials, such as visual illustrations of key concepts, a glossary and a 1-page formula cheat sheet.

What you’ll learn:

• Interpreting margin & markup data and how to improve the related KPI's

• Identify the components of a price

• Markdown calculations, types, benefits and risks

• Analyze the open to buy calculation

• Understand inventory turns

• Apply learnings to ask the right questions when presented with merchandising data

• Shrink calculations and concepts

• Break-even analysis

• Introduction to an income statement

• Comp sales & SG&A expense ratios

• Operations efficiency metrics including sales per employee

• How to measure customer perception & behavior