Nike has acquired a company specialising in predictive analytics to improve its inventory management across different channels.
The sports brand retailer paid an undisclosed sum for Boston-based Celect, which has a range of technologies across the data science and software engineering spaces.
Celect has a cloud analytics platform which offers localised demand predictions, allowing retailers to allocate inventory to the most useful channel.
The Celect team will be integrated into Nike’s global operations team, while its co-founders, who are professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will provide consultancy services.
Eric Sprunk, COO at Nike, said: “With the acquisition of Celect, Nike greatly accelerates our digital advantage by adding a platform developed by world-class data scientists.”
“As demand for our product grows, we must be insight-driven, data-optimised and hyper-focused on consumer behaviour. This is how we serve consumers more personally at scale.”
John Andrews, Celect CEO, said: “We’re thrilled to be joining the Nike team, adding our unique and innovative capabilities to the data and analytics foundation they’ve been building over the years.”
Nike saw a huge margin decline in 2016 as it was forced to discount excess stock in North America. In the early 2000s it had also lost millions in sales due to issues.
