By: Shivani Persad, August 06 2024
In the fast-paced world of retail, tracking trends can be a difficult task. Retailers constantly grapple with crucial questions: What do consumers want, and when? Which products should they stock up on or continue buying? What items should they phase out? While data holds the answers, many retailers struggle to analyze it effectively or simply lack the time to do so.
Enter Tali Remennik and her co-founder, seasoned data analysts, who recognized this critical gap in the demand forecasting market. Their solution is Granularity – an innovative platform that harnesses the power of AI to predict product trends for merchandisers.
Granularity’s journey took an exciting turn when Tali participated in our Tech Accelerator program powered by Moneris. Here’s our interview, where we discuss her personal journey and the evolution of Granularity.
Can you tell us about your background and what inspired you to start Granularity?
Before founding Granularity, I was a data scientist at Accenture, where I built and deployed AI use cases for retailers across North America. What inspired me was seeing a gap in the market. While a lot of investment went into shortening supply chain lead times, there wasn’t enough improvement in forecasting demand and making core decisions that drive the supply chain. My co-founder and I saw an opportunity to transform businesses by improving these core demand forecasting and merchandising decisions that drive profit.
Can you describe Granularity and the problem it aims to solve?
Our company, Granularity, aims to solve the problem of inefficient demand forecasting and merchandising decisions in retail. We focus on improving the core decisions that drive profit in retail businesses. We do this by using market indicators and sales data to get ahead of consumer demand trends, allowing retailers to decide better what products should be on their shelves and in what quantities.
What were some of the key challenges you faced when starting Granularity?
One of the main challenges we faced was scale and focus. We’re tackling a very large-scale problem at an industry level, so we had to chunk out the pieces we wanted to focus on and decide which verticals to target. Another challenge was finding the right starting point. While we’re experts in how data science improves forecasting accuracy, we realized that wasn’t necessarily the best place to start in transforming a business. That’s why we’re now starting on the merchandising and marketing side of the business.
What makes your Granularity unique in the market?
Granularity specializes in moving with consumer demand faster than other solutions in the market. We use market indicators that come ahead of sales data, combined with actual sales data, to get ahead of the market. We haven’t seen anything else that can move as fast as Granularity does in predicting and adapting to market trends.
How has your company evolved since its inception?
We’ve evolved in our focus and understanding of the retail ecosystem. Initially, we worked closely with forecasters, but we learned that merchandisers and marketers make many of the decisions that forecasters ultimately work with. This led us to start working more with merchandisers and marketers. Now, we see a more holistic picture and are building the blocks to solve the whole picture of retail decision-making.
What motivated you to apply for the Tech Accelerator program with Elevate and Moneris?
We were excited about working with industry leaders like Moneris, which has good data practices and ways of building products that can help merchants. We also saw many benefits in the whole end-to-end ecosystem, starting from Moneris and including the entire Elevate team and process.
How has the program helped you overcome specific challenges you faced as an entrepreneur?
The program has been instrumental in helping us with scaling challenges. Working with the Moneris team and the Elevate team, we’ve been able to nail down our go-to-market strategy and our platform strategy on what we will need to scale and automate.
Can you share a memorable experience or key learning from the program?
A really impactful experience was working with the Moneris team and hearing how much they cared about the problem we’re solving. They’ve worked with hundreds of merchants, so to hear them confirm how pivotal demand forecasting and merchandising is to all of their merchants was very meaningful. It reminded us of how important our work is and led to continued discussions and support. This validation has led to additional support and ongoing discussions about how we can continue to improve and scale our solution.
What resources or support from the program have been most beneficial to your company’s growth?
The strategic guidance on our go-to-market and platform strategies has been incredibly beneficial. Also, the validation and support from industry experts like Moneris have been crucial in helping us refine our focus and understand the real-world impact of our solution.
What are your future plans for your company?
Our future plans revolve around scaling. We’re focusing on how to make our process the best for retailers, particularly grocery and convenience store retailers. We’re working on automating our solution to allow category managers to easily identify emerging trends and make decisions on product assortments. We aim to expand our capability to cover more product categories on demand and make it as easy as possible for category managers to use our insights.
What advice would you give to other entrepreneurs who are starting their journey?
My advice would be to make sure you’re focusing on a really big problem that is core to businesses and needs to be solved urgently. Ensure that the problem you’re addressing is critical to businesses, because then you can grow and evolve your business to continuously solve that problem in many different ways. We’re lucky to be in the demand forecasting and merchandising space, which is extremely ripe for innovation and pivotal to every retail business.
We encourage you to follow Tali’s journey with Granularity as they further develop their software and scale. If you want funding and support to scale your tech company globally and identify as a woman or gender-diverse founder, apply to our next Tech Accelerator, powered by Moneris.
