key merchandising issue that held back the business from being successful. Most of the time, the key issue is a lack of focus on developing new merchandise.

actively evaluate new merchandise today, identifying future "winners", promoting those items, giving them every possible chance to succeed.

freeze the file as of exactly twelve months ago. Then, I identify all the customers purchasing exactly two times in the year prior to that. Finally, I measure how these customers performed in the next twelve months

"Loyalty Killers". These items have an attribute associated with them that cause customers to purchase less frequently in the future.

I've identified just two strategies that cause businesses to thrive. 1. A robust and reasonably inexpensive new customer acquisition program. 2. The ability of a business to consistently introduce, cultivate, and promote new items to best-seller status.

Short-term profit, which almost everybody optimizes to a fault, focuses on exploiting existing customers with existing best sellers to increase profitability.

Merchandise in low price point bands causes customers to come back and repurchase at higher rates than does merchandise in high price point ranges.

For whatever the reason, the companies I work with chose to cut back on new item investments following The Great Recession. This allowed businesses to return to healthy levels of profitability faster. Today, businesses are paying for reduced new item investments.

Identify Weights. I run a regression model to learn how important historical transactions are, compared to current transactions, using twelve month future demand as the dependent variable, and twelve-month historical variables (0-12, 13-24, 25-36, 37-48, 49-60, 61+) as independent variables. I only run the model on 0-12 month buyers.