Data Driven Retail Consulting for Heat Merchants Group
The Client: Heat Merchants Group
The Challenge: Identify the best locations for new stores.
The Solution: Customer analytics & convenience modelling, followed by gap analysis.
The Company
Heat Merchants Group is an award-winning, 100% Irish-owned company trading as Heat Merchants and Tubs & Tiles.
The group has 32 Heat Merchants branches and 12 Tubs & Tiles showrooms supported by a central warehouse and distribution hub.
Heat Merchants supplies a comprehensive portfolio of heating, plumbing and renewable energy solutions for both domestic and commercial projects.
Tubs & Tiles is a renowned supplier of premium tiles and bathrooms to both homeowners and commercial projects within the retail, hospitality, healthcare, education and industrial sectors.
The Challenge
Due to sustained business growth, Heat Merchants Group decided in 2018 to expand their store network across Ireland.
Senior management wanted to identify the best locations for these new stores and to gain a better understanding of their customers and their business’s market share.
Traditionally, in the past, retailers would have relied primarily on gut instinct and experience to make these investment decisions but, with an ever-changing and increasingly complex retail landscape, Heat Merchants Group wanted a more rational method of identifying the locations most similar to their top performing stores and determine what KPIs drive business there.
The Solution
At the time of the engagement, Heat Merchants had 31, and Tubs & Tiles had 11 stores across the Republic of Ireland. Due to the differences in their business models and thus consumer behaviour, each network was assessed separately. Broadly, this process comprises a two-step process:
- Situation Assessment
(Consumer Analytics & Convenience Modelling) - Gap Analysis
Results
With Gamma’s location modelling as a significant input to their roll-out analysis, Heat Merchants Group has successfully opened two new stores so far, both at locations that were identified. Through advanced customer analytics and convenience modelling, the Group were also able to assess their current revenue and market share distribution. The results will continue to influence Heat Merchants’ expansion strategy.
