From Insight to Impact: DCS Collaborates with QD Stores

At DCS, we offer impartial category and ranging advice to our retail and wholesale partners. With the right insights at hand, our partners can make the right decisions about what products they should stock in their range. The advice we offer can help grow sales significantly and give efficiency improvements with a product range that makes more profit using fewer SKUs.

That’s why QD Stores recently handed the keys to us for their household, health, and beauty range, and allowed us to completely revamp their product offering. QD is a successful, forward-thinking discount retailer, and we have worked closely with them to agree on a range that meets all their needs – the amount of space allocated in store, number of SKUs, rate of sale and overall profitability.

Carrying out a range review in the Discounter channel isn’t as straightforward as it is in other channels, as there is much less market data to work with. We analysed the data that is available and then overlayed it with insights into the latest shopper trends, including how shoppers are managing their budgets through the cost-of-living crisis, how they shop the different household, health, and beauty categories and how they make decisions about which products to buy when they’re in a store. We then modelled this against QD Stores’ sales out data to identify where they were performing well and where there were opportunities for improvement, and from this, we produced a full set of recommendations and planograms.

The next stage was to conduct a trial in a small number of stores, to make sure the theory used in our recommendations lined up with the reality of how shoppers behave in QD Stores. Six stores were selected, giving a balanced mix of store sizes, locations, and local shopper demographics. We created detailed planograms for all 6 stores – that’s 103 individual 1-metre bays, incorporating a total of 900 SKUs. Our recommendations included more than 400 new SKUs accompanied by several delists to streamline the range where needed. Initial results from the trial stores are very strong, with the new range outperforming the old range by more than double.

The cost-of-living crisis means a high proportion of households are looking to save money on their grocery bills, and many shoppers are switching to discounter stores to save money, so the timing of our project with QD could not be better. As well as watching their budgets, shoppers are also becoming increasingly time-poor, meaning they will be attracted to stores that are a ‘one-stop shop’ for all the products they need, and they will plan to visit a store where they can get most of their shopping list in one place. A product range that covers all the key shopper needs states is important for attracting loyal shoppers back to the store on a regular basis.

If you’re a DCS customer, you can get access to our category expertise and advice too – just get in touch with your account manager.