Solos Studio

How the work
actually gets done.

No phase plans. No frameworks. Just rigor and tenacity.

THE WAY WE WORK

01

Get inside the business

Understand how decisions are actually being made, not how they're reported. We look at the real inputs — not the summary. Root cause first, always.

02

Align the teams

Bring key stakeholders in from the start. Everyone working from the same picture — no competing reports, no parallel realities.

03

Clean the foundation

Fix the data, structure, and logic so the business reflects reality. Definitions aligned. Inputs trustworthy. Nothing built on top of something that doesn't hold.

04

Build forward

Processes in place that scale without us. Every engagement closes with a clear picture of what was fixed, what changed, and what the team needs to keep moving.

RESULTS

What this looks like in practice

Here's the mess. Here's what we did. Here's what changed.

Inventory stacked on inventory. Vendors pushing newness with no clearing strategy.

THE PROBLEM

Thousands of SKUs across a large retail fleet with no consistent logic. Core and seasonal items mixed with no defined roles. One category driving 68% of sales but only 46% of SKU count — nobody had connected those two numbers.

WHAT WE DID

  • ✓Rebuilt SKU targets by store cluster and category
  • ✓Shifted assortment ratio to reflect where sales actually came from
  • ✓Separated true carryover from new and exit items
  • ✓Built vendor line lists as the single source of truth across merchandising, planning, and VM
  • ✓Cleaned stat codes so they reflected true item role — not historical workarounds

WHAT CHANGED

Vendor conversations shifted from item-level debate to assortment-level planning. Teams aligned around one framework. A phased roadmap handed off so the work continued after we left.

👉 A system that held after we left

Every vendor submitting data differently. No way to compare. No way to plan.

THE PROBLEM

No standard format across vendors. Images, attributes, and lifecycle status all inconsistent. Impossible to make clean decisions or hold vendors accountable to a shared framework.

WHAT WE DID

  • ✓Built standardized vendor templates with instructions and common mistakes embedded directly in the files
  • ✓Forced alignment on lifecycle status, stat codes, and load-in timing
  • ✓Built a system vendors could follow and internal teams could trust

WHAT CHANGED

Faster decisions. Cleaner POs. Less back-and-forth. One version of the truth that vendors and internal teams both worked from.

👉 The back-and-forth stopped

Teams chasing metrics that don't reflect reality.

THE PROBLEM

Leadership pulled into noise. Planning teams spinning cycles on bad inputs. Metrics that looked right on the surface but drove the wrong behavior underneath. Significant effort. Low confidence.

OUR POV

If the metric is wrong, everything built on top of it is wrong.

WHAT WE DID

  • ✓Challenged core reporting assumptions before anyone built on top of them
  • ✓Reframed how to interpret inventory and in-stock performance
  • ✓Shifted the team's focus from outputs to inputs

WHAT CHANGED

Better conversations at the leadership level. Less wasted effort. More trust in the numbers that actually matter.

👉 Clarity replaced noise

Strong team. Broken foundation. No one had looked underneath.

THE PROBLEM

New leadership arrived with a mandate to grow. Deep product knowledge on the team. But the underlying structure — data definitions, assortment logic, cross-functional alignment — had never been examined. Decisions were being made on top of something nobody fully understood.

WHAT WE DID

  • ✓Got inside the business before recommending anything
  • ✓Identified where the foundation was breaking — not where it looked broken
  • ✓Built a clear picture of what was fixed, what was next, and what the team needed to keep moving

WHAT CHANGED

The team stopped working around the problem and started working through it. Structure introduced in weeks, not quarters.

👉 Foundation first. Everything else followed.