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 When NPD's fashion and athletic footwear clients need quick, reliable market information for presentations, business decision-making and planning purposes, they look to NPD's Dashboard and Solution Folders technology. Kimberly Wells-Bernard, an NPD Fashionworld account representative for footwear clients, filled us in on the NPD Fashionworld Solution Folder charts her clients turn to most frequently for footwear market insight.
Whether a footwear manufacturer needs to know how an account stacks up against other retailers, or which brands are hot and which are not, Solution Folders present the answers instantly, in an easily-accessible, graphic format.
Here's a look at three of the Solution Folder charts Kimberly's clients count on and the critical business questions they address:
Retail Market
It's no secret that the retail environment has drastically changed over the past three years. Retailer differentiation and having a strong understanding of who shops in your stores are key in today's market. This report helps NPD Fashionworld's clients understand this valuable information.
The chart below tracks retail sales and trends, making it easier to identify expansion opportunities within new retailers and gain market share. Clients can use this report to track key accounts and benchmark their performance against the competition so they can maximize their exposure. It also gives clients insight into the consumer demographic make-up within every retailer. Footwear clients use this information to create consumer profiles, which lets them conduct a comparative analysis across key demographic attributes.
Category Overview
Footwear competes with many other product categories for consumer dollars: apparel, electronics, entertainment and many more. Today's footwear consumers are shopping smarter and demanding greater value, but not at the cost of fashion. To be successful, footwear manufacturers must be able to react quickly to emerging trends. With our Category Overview Report, they can.
The Category Overview Report provides clients with the information they need to analyze and grow their businesses. With just a few clicks through the report, clients can size the market and gain a clear understanding of what's fueling sales within their key channels of distribution, by age, gender, region, income or brand. Category Overview also offers NPD's manufacturer clients insight into what's driving the business, allowing them to strategically position their products to fill voids in the marketplace.
Category/Brand Performance
Increased 'casualization' in the workplace has heightened consumer demand for greater versatility and usage in the footwear they purchase. The Category/Brand Performance Report allows clients to effectively track category trends, thereby ensuring that their product assortment remains consistent with market demands.
Many of Kimberly's clients use this report to gauge the impact of category shifts on topline sales and brand share. For example, one client noticed the beginnings of a downward trend within one of his company's core categories. He then shared this information with his company's Strategic Planning team, which worked with Product Development to diversify the company's product mix to include more casual shoes. Shortly after production, the company launched an exciting ad campaign, promoting the brand's new direction and its rich assortment of functional styles. To date, the client has been able to expand into a profitable new category and remains the only department store brand that is posting double-digit growth in a declining market. That's the power of Solution Folders.
Not involved in the footwear industry? Similar Solution Folder charts exist for other industries NPD monitors. Contact your NPD account representative or e-mail insights@npd.com.
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