About Gorilla Rx

Headquarters
Product
Locations
Services

Los Angeles, California
Happy Buyers
1
Retail

Every retail buyer, big and small, has a spreadsheet or 15. However, the size of the operation may influence how confident they feel about how well they’re holding it down.

Buyers at single-location retailers tend to have a higher level of confidence in their processes than a single buyer for 3+ locations does. Those buyers feel like they’re constantly drowning.

Single-location buyers are still busy people, but they don’t feel like they’re drowning in how much they reorder, from whom, and when. Between their spreadsheets and being at the store every day seeing the same shelves, they feel they have a super good pulse on what is needed or not.

The same was true of Raven Gresham, Inventory Purchaser at Gorilla Rx, when she was first introduced to Happy Buyers. How did we convince her that there was a better way?

The proof is in the product

Raven works out of the shop and is on the floor daily. Before working with us, she was spending about 15-20 hours a week on ordering tasks.

At the time, she approached ordering in three ways:

1. Since she was on the sales floor every day, she knew what was popular and sold out quickly and reordered based on that insight.

2. Owners like the shelves to look full, so she did a lot of spot checking on the sales floor and reordered the products that were in the empty spaces, regardless of how popular those products actually were.

3. She was also manually factoring in lead times to her orders, giving most brands a 3-5 business day turnaround time. This was all being done within a Google Sheet and then by contacting her vendors via text/email.

Showing her how we manage “Demand Groups” was the thing that got her to give Happy Buyers a real swing. If you don’t know what Demand Groups are in Happy Buyers, give this a read. But briefly, since you’re here:

‍Demand Groups help bundle rotational SKUs that are always ordered as part of a category, like “infused 1g prerolls” or just about any flower on your shelf. Because brands tend to use different strains or flavors in these kinds of categories, it’s very difficult to analyze how many SKUs to reorder at any given time because your POS data has them all broken out by SKU, not by groups.

‍She was pretty excited to use these. Our rockstar Customer Support manager Emily built her out a good amount of groups to start and she had a list she was able to provide to use to build out some additional ones for her top selling/most ordered brands.

Ok but how accurate are you, really?

You can’t ever just trust sales and marketing. Even as you read this, our own marketing content, know that we intend for you to check the work of any toolset and ensure it’s going to do what they say it’s going to do; we are no different.

Raven wanted to know if the system was actually accurately predicting ordering levels and properly analyzing run rates on the products she so intimately knew from the shelves.

She had been using Happy Buyers to confirm her orders/check her work and was pleased that the numbers were matching up. With enough of these experiences, she had built trust in our toolset to rely on it for end of year holidays.

She was going out of town for 10 days at the end of December so Emily met with her right before the trip and she let us know she was using us to overstock the store as there wouldn't be any orders coming in while she was out. Raven felt very confident in the numbers we were providing her when a larger “Days on Hand” number was used in our tool because she checked our work and saw that the maths mathed.

Look, we sympathize with retail buyers. Being overstocked isn’t always just a result of inaccurate data analysis or gut-shot buying, even when that’s a constant. Sometimes you are overstocked because of weird negotiations or make-goods because of previous commitments you’re stuck with made by past employees. Certainly that was part of the story here with Gorilla RX.

At time of writing, Gorilla RX only has $11,850 in overstocked inventory - which is the 3rd lowest amount out of everyone we work with on Happy Buyers! That represents a 57% reduction from their starting position of $27,400 in overstocked inventory.

If you extend those savings throughout the year, it totals $31,200, which is a significant number for a single small social equity store.

We also talk about “saving you time” with this tool, and it sounds like empty platitudes to many people who have heard it all. Raven was the same way when we told her that.

Time savings don’t always get reclaimed for time-off, oftentimes they get relegated to other tasks buyers just don’t have much time to handle otherwise. Particularly for a small social equity store.

After working in Happy Buyers, Raven reduced the amount of time she spends personally making ordering decisions from 15-20 hours a week to 13-15 hours, a 15-35% reduction.

“We’re a small social equity store so we don't have capital like other dispensaries may have. I have to be very strategic with buying. But [Happy Buyers] affirming my decisions is major, and having a number that I can easily pull with the previous strains/flavors we have had in stock is major, which ultimately has freed up more time for inventory counts.”

Whether you’re a single location retailer or a huge MSO, these problems don’t go away, they just compound. We’re here to help reduce that burden, giving you back your time and your money.

Ready to be convinced? Sign up to take a look at Happy Buyers here.

Know any other retailers out there struggling with these problems? Share them with us here and we will pay you handsomely for the love!