Merchandising is often called the heartbeat of retail. But what happens when that heartbeat is stuck in survival mode?
Elena, a Divisional Merchandising Manager, starts Monday with a vision for the week. She wants to refine assortments across apparel, jewelry, accessories, and home goods. She hopes to focus on sourcing, supplier negotiations, and forecasting growth. Instead, she spends her day reconciling mismatched PO worksheets, cleaning up quotesheets from suppliers, and re-keying SKUs into disconnected PLM and PIM systems.
By Friday, she is drained. Not because she led strategy, but because she was buried in execution.
This is the merchandising trap: a function designed to drive growth for suppliers and retailers, reduced to task work in a maze of data entry. The retail industry, from Ecommerce to wholesale, can no longer afford to treat merchandising as execution alone. To compete, merchandising must evolve into strategy.
Execution keeps the wheels turning, but it does not create differentiation. Two retailers can buy from the same suppliers, source from the same factories, and even use the same ERP or PLM systems. Execution gives them parity, not leadership.
Without strategy, merchandising becomes backward looking. Teams chase last year’s numbers, react to competitors, and hope their assortments line up with shifting customer expectations. But in today’s fast-moving retail landscape, from apparel and fashion to FMCG and CPG, chasing is a losing game. Strategy is the only way forward.
The problem is not just philosophical. It is painfully practical. Merchandising teams spend entire days lost to redundant tasks. Industry surveys reveal that more than 40 percent of teams lose three to six hours each week to repetitive data entry, while 15 percent lose more than six hours. That is a full workday wasted.
The impact ripples outward. Supplier quotations sit in inboxes, slowing RFQ cycles. Orders take days to finalize. Products hit shelves late, missing their cultural or seasonal window. In FMCG, where timing drives ROI, this can mean reduced margin. In fashion and sporting goods, it can mean missing the trend entirely.
Execution without strategy drains time, margin, and customer trust.
When merchandising evolves into strategy, everything changes. Assortment planning shifts from reactive to predictive, anticipating customer demand instead of waiting for sales reports. Catalog Management and Digital Asset Management bring SKUs, specifications, and media into a single source of truth, creating clarity where chaos once reigned.
Data standardization and governance give leaders confidence in their numbers, reducing errors in POs, RFQs, and supplier negotiations. Supplier collaboration moves out of email threads and into shared systems, allowing vendors and retailers to move faster and more accurately together.
What was once a patchwork of piecemeal solutions becomes an all in one operating system. Merchandising becomes a strategic function that drives growth, margin expansion, and speed to market.
Elena’s workweek looks different in this new reality.
Instead of losing mornings to manual cleanup, she sits down with her design and sourcing teams to evaluate new product development proposals. When quotations come in from suppliers, she reviews them in real time against margin targets instead of copying them into spreadsheets.
Midweek, her General Merchandising Manager asks how the new apparel line aligns with Ecommerce demand. This time, Elena does not scramble through mismatched files. She opens a dashboard that integrates PIM, DAM, and CRM data in one place. She answers with clarity and authority.
For the first time, Elena feels like she is leading strategy, not cleaning up execution.
The best retailers prove every day that merchandising is not back-office work. It is strategy in action.
| Costco, for example, has built trust by narrowing its SKU count and elevating Kirkland Signature as a mark of quality. Instead of offering everything, it curates carefully, showing that Category Management is about clarity as much as choice. |
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| REI offers another lesson. Its #OptOutside campaign was more than marketing. It reshaped its assortments, aligning supplier partnerships and product selections with sustainability values. Merchandising became a tool for storytelling and brand mission. |
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| Lululemon approaches merchandising as lifestyle. Leggings and yoga mats are not just products. They are pieces of a broader story about wellness, performance, and community. By weaving lifestyle into every assortment, the brand builds loyalty that execution alone could never achieve. | |
| Other global players show the breadth of MerchOps strategy. Walmart balances scale in hardlines and FMCG through advanced Category Management and master data governance. Nike uses PLM and DAM to create product drops that double as cultural events. Unilever coordinates suppliers across CPG categories with unified PLM and MDM systems, accelerating speed to market while protecting margin. |
The difference between execution and strategy can be visualized as a pyramid. Execution forms the base. Assortment and pricing strategy builds above it. Category leadership sits higher still. At the top rests growth and loyalty, the rewards unlocked only by strategic merchandising.
Teams stuck at the base are trapped in manual work. Teams that climb transform merchandising into a lever for growth.
Execution vs. Strategic MerchOps
The contrast is clear.
Execution only teams spend hours reconciling spreadsheets, juggling disconnected systems, and re-keying data into PO worksheets. Their decisions are reactive, and their systems slow them down.
Strategic MerchOps teams, on the other hand, rely on accurate, standardized master data that serves as a single source of truth. They align product development, sourcing, RFQs, quotations, and purchase orders in one seamless flow. Supplier collaboration happens in real time. Forecasting and planning are proactive, not reactive.
The results are undeniable. Strategic teams deliver greater efficiency, higher accuracy, faster speed to market, and stronger ROI. Execution only teams tread water, while strategic teams pull ahead.
The shift to strategic merchandising is not limited to one vertical. It touches every category of the retail industry.
In apparel and fashion, it enables faster response to trends and cleaner supplier collaboration. In accessories and jewelry, it improves catalog accuracy and reduces errors in quotations. In home goods and hardlines, it simplifies category management across complex assortments. In sporting goods, it makes seasonal planning more agile. And in FMCG and CPG, it drives speed to market, unlocking margin and comp growth through unified PLM and MDM systems.
Whether wholesale, Ecommerce, or B2B sales, the story is the same. Merchandising strategy drives efficiency, accuracy, and growth.
The future belongs to teams that treat merchandising as strategy. These teams will reject piecemeal solutions and adopt all in one systems that unify PLM, PIM, MDM, DAM, and CRM. They will standardize and govern their data. They will build living catalogs that serve as reliable sources of truth across every workflow.
Execution only teams will be left behind. Strategic MerchOps teams will move faster, protect margins, and win loyalty. Merchandising will no longer be back office work. It will be the engine of retail growth.
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