General merchandise and discount retailers

Seasonal categories and weather shift demand quickly. If a retailer misses the window to catch a trend or transition inventory, the sales opportunity, and the shelf space, is gone for the year.

New SKUs, private-label lines, and trending items launch constantly, but with no sales history to build from, opening orders often come down to a planner’s best guess.

Deciding when and how much to discount is a constant balancing act, and the longer a product sits past its sell-through window, the more margin it quietly costs.

Fuel, freight, tariffs, and sourcing costs move constantly and often independently of each other, leaving plans out of date before they can be executed.

Stock exists somewhere in the network, just not where it’s needed. This leaves some channels out of stock while others sit on excesses of the same SKU. 

General merchandise assortments often run 40,000–50,000 SKUs across dozens of categories, and some are slow movers with thin, inconsistent sales data. Without a clear read on which items drive the category, cutting the wrong SKU costs sales, and keeping the wrong one costs space and margin.

RELEX forecasts at the product-store-day level and clusters stores by climate and local demand patterns, so seasonal transitions are planned by region instead of off one national curve. RELEX demand sensing and halo signals keep outgoing sell-down and incoming ramp-up balanced as one decision, not two. 

RELEX auto-matches new SKUs to comparable reference products and selects the forecasting approach that fits the category, so opening orders are grounded in data from launch, even at volumes of thousands of new SKUs across hundreds of doors. 

RELEX flags overstock risk months ahead of a product’s termination date and runs the pricing math automatically. It knows what discount will clear the stock, and by when, so clearance becomes a deliberate strategy. 

RELEX models fuel, freight, and tariff pressure together and plans replenishment frequency from actual demand, so orders are sized to fill trucks efficiently instead of driving cost through partial loads and rushed deliveries. 

RELEX forecasts and allocates demand separately for digital and physical channels, protecting committed inventory through dynamic allocation and ringfencing in the DC, so stores, fast fulfillment, and same-day delivery each draw from a plan built for how they sell. 

RELEX builds consumer decision trees directly from a retailer’s own transaction data, showing how shoppers navigate a category, including where they’ll switch if an item disappears. Retailers use this to cluster stores by real purchase behavior and localize assortments at scale, instead of managing space and range decisions off intuition or a spreadsheet.