Aptos, a recognised market leader in retail technology solutions, announced today that Cultura, the French specialist in the sale of editorial and artistic leisure products, will deploy Aptos’ Merchandise Financial Planning and Assortment Planning solutions. With this technology selection, Cultura will benefit from advanced tools to optimise every merchandising opportunity — from budgeting and in-season management to achieving customer-focused assortments that meet localised demand.
Since its founding in 1998, Cultura has been a key player in the market for editorial and artistic leisure goods. Cultura offers a diverse assortment of over 300,000 items, including books, music, multimedia, videos, stationery, gifts, musical instruments and a multitude of other products in support of creative and artistic activities.
Guided by its mission to “bring culture to life and love,” Cultura has nearly 100 stores in France and a dynamic e-commerce site at www.cultura.com. With the aim to optimise its physical and digital retail offerings, Cultura recognised the need to streamline and automate key processes across the merchandise lifecycle.
“With the ambition to continue the development of our business, Cultura requires a technology foundation that will allow us to scale our merchandise processes without losing our unique ability to offer products that are highly relevant to shoppers within a local area,” said Rebeca Colling, Strategy Director and CIO at Cultura. “As we benchmarked different solutions, Aptos’ planning technology stood out based on its alignment with our functional requirements, its proven support for complex omnichannel retailing and its ability to create highly localised assortments.
“At this stage of our growth and omnichannel transformation journey, we view Aptos as a strategic partner,” said Colling. “Aptos’ expertise in the retail sector and track record of satisfied customers give us great confidence that we’ll be able to deliver the ideal assortment for each customer, no matter the purchase channel.”
Trusted by hundreds of brands to optimise the merchandise lifecycle, Aptos’ planning solutions help retailers manage inventory with greater accuracy and plan the ideal mix of merchandise with optimal margins and breadth.
With the Aptos solutions, Cultura will be able to define and manage its financial objectives, taking into account a diverse product set, the demand forecast, and requirements that are unique to each site and local market, even as its store count grows.
“By facilitating tighter collaboration between Cultura’s central planning teams and its store managers, Aptos technology will help this retailer offer the best possible selection of global and local brands and tailor the assortment to the specificities of each store,” said Aptos President and COO Steve Towe.
“Localising assortments in a fast-moving and omnichannel environment requires the ability to make product decisions rapidly and accurately, from strategy to execution,” Towe added. “With our advanced planning technologies built for an omnichannel world, Cultura can continue to bring creativity to life and offer the best products and experiences, no matter when or where a shopper is engaging with the Cultura brand.”