Fashion customer from Looker, briefed to finance
Your P&L surprises are born on the store floor. Ward flags fashion customer movement in your Looker data in time to act, with the cause and a recommended move attached.
The full picture: fashion customer, Looker data, Finance decisions
Applied to Fashion & Apparel, the surface area is 15,000+ SKUs over locations. Seasonal sell-through, size curve optimization, and markdown timing. Ward monitors style velocity and flags slow movers before the window closes.
Your P&L surprises are born on the store floor. Ward sends insight cards scoped to finance decision-making.
Customer Behavior. Ward tracks basket composition shifts, daypart patterns, and customer segment migration.
Under the hood. Ward analyzes transaction-level data to detect shifts in basket composition, shopping frequency, daypart preferences, and segment movement.
Getting the data in. Ward can query Looker via API or connect directly to the underlying database. Either way, Ward monitors while your team browses.
Key capabilities
- Customer segment migration
- Cross-sell opportunity detection
- Basket composition trends
- Daypart behavior modeling
Chat
Ask anything. Ward routes to the right agent and returns cited answers.
I pulled fall denim against last season’s curve at the same selling week. Two causes, both still fixable this week.
| Signal | Finding |
|---|---|
sell_through | Week 6 sell-through 38% vs. 52% plan, concentrated in 3 of 9 door clusters |
size_curve | Waist 30–32 sold out in 41 doors while 36–38 sits at 71% on hand |
markdown.ladder | First markdown is 3 weeks later than LY, weeks-of-supply now 11.4 |
Recommend: transfer 30–32 out of the 12 overstocked doors, hold the ladder on core indigo, and take the first markdown on light wash now while it still clears at 20%.
sell_through_weekly…
Reporting
Pinned views built from saved data-lake queries. Every number re-derivable from its SQL.
| Model | Horizon | MAPE |
|---|---|---|
holt_winters | 4wk | 4.1% |
arima_sarimax | 13wk | 8.9% |
gbm_demand | 1wk | 2.1% |
bayes_hier | new store | 11.4% |
Sources
Connect external systems to the data lake.
| Name | Type | Last sync |
|---|---|---|
shopify_orders_daily | import | 2m ago |
shopify_returns_reasons | import | 2m ago |
netsuite_inventory_snapshot | import | 14m ago |
cegid_store_sales | import | 1h ago |
retail_size_curve_actuals | import | 1h ago |
retail_markdown_ladder | import | 1h ago |
retail_ga4_website_daily | import | 1h ago |
Policies
Browse and manage Cedar access policies for your tenant.
| Policy ID | Effect | Resources |
|---|---|---|
merch-read-default | permit | Model::* |
finance-read-markdown | permit | Model::"markdown_ladder" |
vendor-blocked | forbid | Model::"labor_*" |
ecom-read-returns | permit | Model::"returns_reasons" |
Why Customer matters for Fashion retail
Lifecycle moments, new jobs, size changes, trend adoption, create predictable opportunity windows in fashion. When a customer shifts from full-price to sale-only purchasing, that's a churn signal. Ward tracks these behavioral shifts at the cohort level to inform marketing spend, staffing, and inventory positioning.
Why this combination
is its own problem.
Most customer projects stall at data access. This one does not, because Looker already exposes looker API for query results, underlying database (direct), lookML model metadata through an API Ward reads directly.
- 01 Size changes get treated as data quality errors when they're often life-stage signals (pregnancy, fitness change) that predict 2-3x category migration.
- 02 Lapsed-customer reactivation campaigns target everyone past a threshold; without the lapse-cause segmentation, win-back ROI is flat across cohorts.
Benchmarks. Fashion top-decile customers drive 35-55% of revenue at 5-10x the LTV of median. A 90-day full-price-to-markdown ratio shift greater than 30% in a cohort typically precedes a 6-month churn lift of 20-40%.
What Ward has eyes on.
Ward pulls from Looker rather than replacing it. Looker API for query results, underlying database (direct), lookML model metadata come across on a read-only connection, get enriched with contextual data, and come back as cards. Your BI is untouched.
The customer model runs each day, not on a reporting calendar. It flags the pattern, explains root cause, and attaches what to do about it before the number reaches a review deck.
Every one of your locations gets its own baseline. Ward tracks sell-through rate, markdown %, return rate against it and pulls forward only the deviations that hold up. The two that show up most in fashion retail are markdown timing and size curve misallocation, and both are baseline problems before they are P&L problems.
At the metric level. Ward tracks purchase frequency cadence, full-price vs markdown mix, category migration, size consistency, and cohort-level churn probability, each benchmarked against seasonal norms and customer lifecycle stage.
What the first 90 days
actually look like.
-
01
Week 1: connect
Read-only credentials to Looker / Looker Studio. Ward ingests looker API for query results, underlying database (direct), lookML model metadata and starts building baselines. First findings land inside 48 hours, before baselines are stable, so you can see the shape of the output early.
-
02
Weeks 2 to 3: baselines
Ward needs roughly two weeks of history per store to separate a real deviation from normal variance. During this window the cards are directionally right and the thresholds are still moving.
-
03
Weeks 4 to 12: steady state
Ward returns cards each day, each with root cause and a recommended action. Volume settles at a level a single person can read over coffee. The measure of success is not how many findings arrive, it is how many get acted on.
How Ward connects to Looker / Looker Studio
Ward does not replace Looker. Ward watches the same data Looker visualizes and proactively alerts when something changes. Your dashboards stay. Ward adds intelligence.
Setup: Ward can query Looker via API or connect directly to the underlying database. Either way, Ward monitors while your team browses.
Data Ward reads from Looker
Impact metrics with Looker
Data lake enrichment
Ward enriches Looker data with: Looker query results, Underlying database, Weather & events, Competitor data, Customer segments
Your P&L surprises are born on the store floor.
- ×Margin erosion only surfaces at month-end close
- ×Inventory carrying costs are a black box
- ×Working capital tied up in slow-moving stock nobody is watching
- ×Same-store sales comps lack decomposition into actionable drivers
- ×Capex decisions for store remodels lack unit-economics evidence
- ✓GMROI tracking by category with weekly insight cards
- ✓Inventory carrying cost alerts when capital efficiency drops
- ✓Working capital optimization recommendations based on turnover trends
- ✓SSS decomposition into traffic, conversion, and basket components
- ✓Store-level unit economics cards for capex prioritization
Inventory distortion, overstock and out-of-stock combined, costs retailers $1.77 trillion globally. Source: IHL Group
Fashion KPI impact
Frequently asked questions
Ward tracks basket composition shifts, daypart patterns, and customer segment migration. For Fashion retail specifically, Ward monitors 15,000+ SKUs across your locations and delivers automated insight cards with root cause analysis and recommended actions.
Ward tracks Sell-through rate, Markdown %, Return rate, Style velocity, Size accuracy at the store-category level. Ward analyzes transaction-level data to detect shifts in basket composition, shopping frequency, daypart preferences, and segment movement.
Ward can query Looker via API or connect directly to the underlying database. Either way, Ward monitors while your team browses. Data points include: Looker API for query results, Underlying database (direct), LookML model metadata.
Yes. Ward reads Looker data and combines it with contextual signals (weather, events, demographics) to generate Fashion-specific insight cards. No custom development required.
Your P&L surprises are born on the store floor. Ward solves this with automated insight cards: GMROI tracking by category with weekly insight cards. Inventory carrying cost alerts when capital efficiency drops. Working capital optimization recommendations based on turnover trends.
Ward delivers daily insight cards covering Sell-through rate, Markdown %, Return rate, tailored for Finance decision-making. Each card includes what changed, why it matters, and what to do next.
Ward tracks purchase frequency cadence, full-price vs markdown mix, category migration, size consistency, and cohort-level churn probability, each benchmarked against seasonal norms and customer lifecycle stage.
Ward detects meaningful migration from full-price to sale-only purchasing in a high-value customer segment. It correlates the shift with competitor store openings, recent price increases on workwear basics, and declining quality mentions in online reviews. The merchandising team uses the insight to reformulate a core product and adjust pricing on the most price-sensitive items.
First insight cards arrive within 48 hours of data connection. Ward needs approximately 2 weeks to establish stable baselines for your specific operation.
No. Ward sits on top of your existing stack. It is the proactive intelligence layer that watches your data continuously and delivers insight cards, so your team acts on findings instead of hunting for them.
Related solutions
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Root causes, not just alerts. See it on your data.
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