Southern California Success WSS is a retail concept that sells name brand footwear and apparel with a primarily Hispanic customer base. With an average store size of 8,000-12,000 square feet, the brand has concentrated on highly dense, urban areas that can support high volume sales.
WSS found great success in its home base in Southern California, where they are one of Nike’s biggest distributors, and started eyeing opportunities for expansion in other high-density areas. The company quickly realized that expansion comes with many risks, and felt they needed more analytical information to assist with site location decisions.
Hidden Opportunities
WSS turned to Buxton to better understand their market opportunities for expansion and location optimization, and also to reduce the risks associated with site selection.
While Buxton showed WSS multiple expansion opportunities in other regions of the country with similar demographic patterns and urban density, one recommendation surprised WSS: add more stores in the Los Angeles market.
WSS thought they had saturated the LA market, but Buxton’s analytics revealed that due to the region’s density, drive times for core customers were much lower than in other areas.
By analyzing the market at a more granular level, Buxton provided insights on who WSS customersare and how far they travel to visit a store. This information was used to help WSS pinpoint the exact locations that maximized infill opportunities, allowing WSS to grow to 45 stores in LA without negatively impacting sales at existing locations.
Who Really Is My Customer?
Another eye-opening moment for WSS occurred when Buxton showed them variations in their core customer group: Hispanics.
Through Buxton’s segmentation analysis, WSS learned about the many different psychographic groups within the Hispanic population and how each group approaches shopping. Rather than viewing the Hispanic market as one uniform group of consumers, WSS began to consider factors such as shopping habits, educational backgrounds and cultural assimilation.
“One mistake can be very costly, but with Buxton you avoid those mistakes.”
Learning exactly who their customers are, where they come from, and how they approach shopping made a huge difference in WSS’ strategy and provided the confidence needed to make important growth investments.