Footwear Retail ยท South Africa
Tread Footwear
Tread Footwear cleared R4.2m in dead stock across 40 stores and automated weekly replenishment for 18,000 size-colour combinations.
The challenge
Tread Footwear sells across 40 stores in South Africa. Footwear retail is a size and colour matrix problem: one shoe style in 8 sizes and 4 colours is 32 SKUs, and most stores carry 200 or more styles. Getting the right size to the right store at the right time was something the buying team tried to do with weekly spreadsheets and gut feel.
The result was predictable. Popular sizes sold out in Johannesburg while full-size runs sat untouched in smaller towns. Dead stock piled up. At last count, R11m worth of shoes had not moved in 90 days. Markdowns to clear them ate into margins, and even then the stock often ended up in the wrong stores.
Replenishment happened when a store manager called head office, not when the data said it should. There was no system watching sell-through rates or suggesting transfers. By the time someone noticed a gap, the sale was already lost.
The solution
Ran all 40 stores on a single ERP core so every store's sales, stock and pricing lived in one system.
Analysed sell-through at the size-colour level, generated inter-store transfer suggestions weekly, and flagged ageing stock for markdown before it became a write-off.
Gave regional managers a mobile view of each store's fill rate, dead stock value and replenishment status without chasing spreadsheets.
R4.2m
Dead stock cleared in the first 6 months
87%
Size-level fill rate, up from 62%
0
Manual replenishment spreadsheets
“We had eleven million rand in shoes nobody was buying. Replenify moved four million of that to stores where it actually sold.”
- Johan Steenkamp, Merchandise Director, Tread Footwear
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