Hindsighting is the name of the game in retail. It is the practice of studying past performance, analyzing the top performers and the flops, and taking lessons on how to adapt plans in order to effectively reforecast for the future. Taking a cue from our favorite discipline of retail science, we would like to reflect on the past year at Toolio.
Single platform to rule merchandising
At Toolio we believe that the complex world of merchandise planning needs a centralized platform to bring together different stakeholders across the organization from planners and merchants to finance and design - one platform to replace the hundreds of gigantic spreadsheets. We are proud to have completed that core platform over the last year.
Getting there took many product updates along the way. Below were some of the ones we were the most excited about.
Item Planning for bottom-up planning
We completed the Item Planning module early in the year to plan products at the lowest level (SKU x Location) granularity. With this module, we enabled managing all plans (top down and bottom up), the ability to run different scenarios and reconcile all plans and scenarios in a single platform.
Forecasting / Replenishment
Soon after, we added the ability to forecast and replenish core products. The Forecasting feature gave planners the power to choose from various forecasting methods to anticipate future demand. Then, the Generate Receipts feature added the capability to help more accurately plan Purchase Orders to ensure you have enough inventory to meet demand. All with the click of a few buttons (or keyboard shortcuts!)
Out-of-the-Box Views
Our customers cherish the flexibility of the Toolio platform. Through simple configurations within the UI, they can easily customize the Views, rename Metrics and add new Attributes to support their unique planning workflows. Yet, they continued to ask us about the Toolio recommended way of planning, learnings from other customers and industry best practices. To address this, we released our Out-of-the Box Views and Workflows, which provide pre-built functionality that demonstrates our approach to planning reporting, and enables our customers to take advantage of the platform in the most optimal way.
It takes a village
Designing, building and delivering these complex, yet intuitive, capabilities for our customers takes a village. And that village, or rather the team, is what we assembled over the last year. We are very excited to have grown our team almost 3-folds with an incredibly smart, hard-working and kind group of individuals.
Customers, our partners
We are grateful to have added many of the fastest growing brands and retailers including Mack Weldon, Outdoor Voices, Naadam, and Rothy’s to the Toolio platform over the past year. We treat our customers as partners - we lean in to their asks, build our platform to serve their most pressing needs, and plan future updates by understanding what would positively impact their business. It has been an exciting partnership, and we’re looking to many more years of that.
New round of funding to accelerate our vision
Another very exciting update of the year was announcing our Series-A, which was led by Jump Capital with participation from Rho Capital. This marks an important inflection point for the company. Not only does it augment our team with the experience of our investors, but also it gives us the resources to accelerate our product vision and deliver new capabilities.
Forecasting 2022
2021 has been an exhilarating year, and we’re excited about what is to come in 2022. We have an exciting product roadmap ahead of us that will make planning more accurate, intuitive and agile, one step at a time.
2022 will also bring new partnerships and integrations. We will expand our ecosystem of integrations and announce new partnerships with key retail-tech players, solidifying our position as the de-facto planning solution in the next-generation retail tech stack.
Last, but not least, we will continue to grow our team with key roles including Head of Marketing and Head of Partnerships and continue to grow our Sales, Customer Success and Engineering teams.
We’re looking forward to a great year ahead!
P.S. Do your 2022 goals include a new career move? Take a look at our careers page to see if we have the right opportunity for you!
