Lolli and Pops is a specialty confectionery retailer — a "purveyor of sweetness" — with more than 35 locations across the United States, stocking sweets from famed producers and local artisans that change daily with batch size and availability. Consistent, well-executed visual merchandising across that dispersed fleet is central to the in-store experience.
The Challenge
The company's VP of Product leads both buying and much of the visual merchandising across its stores. Each location carries a wide assortment of confectionery SKUs, with between 150 and 360 bins for scooped and bulk sweets, so re-assorting and setting stores is genuinely difficult — requiring repeated meetings with the planning team and, often, a great deal of travel to see layouts in person. The team needed a way to fine-tune and finalize store sets without standing in every store.
The Solution
Using RetailNext's merchandising solution, the team could review still-image snapshots of stores, displays, fixtures, and product assortment remotely. In one instance — working from a flight, on limited airplane Wi-Fi — the VP of Product worked through roughly 10–15 problem stores that had been planned to about 80%, pulling up snapshots from each location, capturing screenshots, and emailing them with annotations to her planner to resolve details such as where to place dark chocolates in a store full of sours.
The Results
By the time the flight landed, the team had finalized the merchandising layout for every store in the exercise — completing the store set entirely remotely and moving straight into implementation. What would otherwise have required additional rounds of planning meetings and in-person store visits was handled from, in effect, 35,000 feet, letting the team execute to plan and serve customers faster.
