Customer Analytics: Casual Male Uses Demographics To Improve Store Assortments

This national retailer of men's apparel is using detailed consumer lifestyle information to more accurately predict what will sell in each of its 500 stores.

If you are a national chain of stores catering to men of every age, social status, income level, and lifestyle type, how do you know the right assortment of merchandise is going to each of your stores? That is the question Casual Male faces as it allocates product to stores that cater to radically different regional demands and market preferences. Casual Male Retail Group, Inc. is a specialty retailer of big and tall men's apparel, with 475 Casual Male locations and 25 Rochester Big & Tall Clothing stores throughout the United States. While its customers have one characteristic in common – they are big or tall – they are otherwise tremendously fragmented, ranging from older suburban executives who favor traditional cuts and styles to young city-dwellers who are more likely to experiment with new fashions.

For the last several years, Casual Male has been growing at a measured pace while focusing on improving internal performance and productivity. "We weren't satisfied with the performance of some of our newer stores," says Dennis Hernreich, executive VP/CFO/COO of Casual Male Retail Group, Inc. "In our search for the reasons for this, we turned to Buxton Co. for additional intelligence." Buxton Co., a market research and analysis firm, draws from its database of over 100 million households to identify individual customers' lifestyles, behavior patterns, and buying habits to advise retail and restaurant chains where their customers come from, what their customers' buying preferences are, and where to locate new stores.