Hallmark Cards is the UK’s largest publisher of greeting cards producing over 1bn cards a year.
Renowned for it’s high quality cards, with over 20,000 SKU lines available, Hallmark also brings the most diverse range of card designs to the UK market.
With over 20,000 SKU lines in circulation during any single year, SKU portfolio management is one of the most demanding issues facing the business. How can Hallmark help to maximise the performance of it’s ranging in store by tailoring the range of cards being sold to suit a specific store.
Hallmark enlisted the help of Nunwood Market Analytics to analyse a morass of SKU sales data across each of it’s independent retail outlets to help it develop store segments that could be approached with unique SKU portfolios designed to maximise sales.
The first phase of analysis involved a SKU by SKU assessment of performance where by all the weak performing SKUs (in terms of sales) were identified and earmarked for replacement. This enabled Hallmark to focus on refreshing it’s overall SKU portfolio by removing the weakest SKUs and replacing with SKUs with higher sales potential.
The second phase of analysis segmented retail outlets into distinct groups based on the SKUs that sold well through these outlets and the SKUs that sold poorly.
Having segmented retail outlets into distinct groups, Hallmark were able to use the results from the segmentation to develop tailored SKU ranges that would maximise card sales within the different store segments.
These revised SKU ranges are now being rolled out across all of Hallmark’s independent retail outlets with the aim of driving a significant uplift in card sales.
