The challenge
A buying process that had outgrown the spreadsheets
Nanso, a leading Nordic fashion and lifestyle brand, relied on spreadsheets for range planning, forecasting, and buying. While this approach kept the business running, it lacked several capabilities essential for efficient merchandising, including visual planning, collaboration, and predictive insights. Completing each buy involved multiple manual steps from gathering data across different systems to entering buy quantities manually to ERP, taking the team up to a week to complete.
“Our previous buying process had evolved over many years, but it had become increasingly time-consuming and manual. We needed a better way to plan assortments, collaborate across teams, and make buying decisions based on data.”
The solution
From pilot to organization-wide adoption
After a successful pilot demonstrated that Clair could identify high-performers, direct the buying budget away from slow-movers, and cut excess inventory, Nanso implemented Clair to support its first buying cycle.
Today, Clair is used across the organization, from leadership to design and marketing, to provide insights for assortment development, financial planning, and target setting while facilitating cross-functional collaboration.
“We saw an opportunity to replace a week of manual spreadsheet work with a collaborative, data-driven planning process.”
Use cases
Stronger decisions, less manual work
With Clair, Nanso builds high-performing store assortments based on expected product performance. Clair's collaborative interface brings together Area Management, Online Retail, Visual Merchandising, and Marketing to plan assortments in one shared workspace.
Clair's AI-powered buy recommendations help buyers purchase the right quantities and optimize size curves at the style level, previously a complex and time-consuming process performed manually. Clair supports the buying process end to end, seamlessly transferring buy plans to the ERP without manual heavy-lifting.
The result
Speed, accuracy, and visibility
By introducing Clair as its collaborative range planning and buying platform, Nanso improved gross margin return on inventory investment by 11%, ensuring that its buying budget was invested where it mattered most.
“Moving from spreadsheets to Clair has made our buying process significantly faster and more intuitive”, says Anne Heikkinen, Area Manager at Nanso Group. The time spent on buying decreased by 60%. A process that previously took up to a week is now completed in just few days.
In addition to improved buying accuracy and reduced manual work, Clair increases visibility across the organization. Store assortments and buy plans that were previously hidden in spreadsheets are now accessible across teams, providing a shared foundation for more effective planning and marketing.
“Having product images, size curves, and buy recommendations in one place helps us make better decisions with much less manual work.”
In summary
The benefits of using Clair’s AI workspace for assortment planning and buying
- 11% improvement in gross margin return on inventory investment
- 60% reduction in time spent buying by eliminating manual spreadsheet workflows
- One shared workspace for collaborative assortment planning across the organization