Resources

Many Accelerated Analytics customers use our portal to get their Canadian retailers’ reporting, such as Nordstrom, Sephora, The Home Depot, Lowe’s and Canadian Tire. Canadian sales in July were mixed. The value of retail sales rose 0.4% to $39.82 billion (US dollars conversion). Year-over-year, nominal retail sales rose 7.8%. The retail segment (excluding auto) rose... Read more »

Accelerated Analytics’ CEO, Chad Symens, and Director of Sales and Marketing, Jen Freyer, attended and sponsored the Home Improvement Research Institute event in Chicago this week. HIRI saw a record turnout of attendees at this 2-day event. Home and hardware vendors and retailers joined industry leaders to share insights into the current and future market... Read more »

Enhancing the DIY Brand-Retailer Connection: A View from Behind the Scenes As the U.S. housing market continues to strengthen, consumers are buying houses and making them their dream homes through DIY improvements. And, when these consumers delve into painting, sanding, tiling and rewiring—perhaps as first time projects—they visit their local home improvement center, looking for... Read more »

Next month will see the opening of Nordstrom’s new concept store, Nordstrom Local. The store will open October 3 in West Hollywood, CA and will be only 3,000 square feet, versus its traditional store size of 140,000 square feet. Nordstrom Local is the company’s latest retail concept and neighborhood hub where customers can shop and... Read more »

The Institute for Supply Management announced on Friday that manufacturing in the US reached a six-year high, seeing activity rise to 58.8 on its index versus 56.3 in July. This is the highest the index has risen since April 2011. This number indicates strong global growth in manufacturing and increased consumer and business confidence in... Read more »

Consumer confidence rose to 122.9 in the August Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index, up from 120 in July. Consumers finding business conditions to be “good” increased 2%, to 34.5%. Consumers also assessed that the labor market was improved, rating jobs are “plentiful” at 35.4%. Those claiming jobs were “hard to get” decreased from 18.7% to... Read more »

With the devastation in Texas from Hurricane Harvey comes help from the two home improvement center giants. The Home Depot Foundation donated $300,000 to the Red Cross, and in its corporate home of Atlanta, the retailer opened its Disaster Response Command Center. Their merchandising, operations and supply chain teams are continuously sending products to stores... Read more »

Accelerated Analytics customers who sell their products at The Home Depot saw their second quarter comp sales increase 11% over last year! That’s nearly double the results reported by The Home Depot when they recently released their second quarter results. In a blog post on August 15th, we shared The Home Depot’s Q2 results which... Read more »

Despite ever-growing announcements of store-closings and retail layoffs, there’s one retail job that is still in high demand: data scientist. With the explosion of e-commerce, brick-and-mortar stores are facing increased pressure to deliver an exceptional shopping experience to their customers; they have to find new ways to compete. U.S. consumers still make about 85% of... Read more »