There’s an old business saying: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”
The Analytics Feature in Delogue is here to resolve that problem. We want to help you measure your results to get better at what you do and grow your business.
We live in a data-driven world, where the importance of data keeps growing. It is not just hype. Brands need to merge analytics into their strategic vision and use it to identify opportunities and weaknesses in their collections.
As in many other industries, analytics has become key for apparel to monitor and compare data for example on how many styles are being made, how big the cancellation rate is, and how sustainable the production is. All this data can be transformed into future insights.
“We see an overall trend that 40% of the styles are canceled, they are never produced. It is a waste of resources, waste of samples, employees, and so on. With the analytics feature we want them to have insights from the beginning before the money is spent and not at the end,” says co-founder Rikke Biehl.
An insight literally means seeing inward — what’s inside the core of your company and your operations. It is anything that will increase your understanding of how everything is actually working. It bridges a gap between how you think things are working and how they actually are working.
Basically, it's a place to observe your entire collection and analyze what products survive, which ones get canceled, and most importantly, where you should focus your development.
Let’s take the Covid-19 situation, for example. Analytics played an essential role, giving brands an overview to evaluate what to keep producing and what to put on hold during these extraordinary times. It was a good lesson for brands to focus on where you make money and forget all that icing on the cake that usually doesn’t sell.
There's also a big potential in reporting how sustainable your production is. By analyzing how many % of all your incoming styles are both produced with sustainable materials and with certified compliant methods you can see if you are on track with your sustainability strategy.
The sky's the limit when it comes to the Analytics Feature because your data is customised, so what you can do with it is endless.
There are very few analytics tools in the market that have been built specifically for the fashion retail industry. And Delogue is one of them. The fact that you can customize your data in the platform means that with the Analytics Feature, you can generate specific data points that are relevant to your daily operations. That is the beauty of using a software purposefully-built for the apparel industry.
“The size of the collection has been a problem for many years. I have been using these types of calculations as a buyer at the beginning of the process because there is a tendency of making too many products in the beginning, based on the minimum quantities,” says Biehl who has designed the feature from her own experience.
It looks and works like Excel, so it is easy to navigate. However, the biggest benefit of doing your data analysis in Delogue and not Excel is that you are working with up-to-date data and not “dead data”. It is more flexible, and the customized fields and price fields you have previously created in Delogue will be the same in the analytical report.
The quality of the data is crucial. When you insert your data in Delogue you must make sure it is “good data”. The better the data, the better the insights you will get. It’s always safer to have 5 data points that are correct than 20 that are bad. This quality data also plays a big role if you want to scale your business to e-commerce.
Let’s not confuse our Analytics Feature with a business intelligence solution. We offer you an integration with Power BI, where you can send data from Delogue, but our feature is not a substitute for Power BI. It is a complement to your data analysis.
One thing to bear in mind when starting Analytics, is that whenever you are analyzing your data, the key is to ask the right questions to find the right answers. While having an analytics tool can improve your analysis, human interpretation remains essential.
To use the Analytics Feature you need to have a good understanding of how to use Excel and graphs. We are happy to teach you, as we know it will be very beneficial for your future collections.
Watch a tutorial on how to use the Analytics Feature.