I work for a large retail dot com specializing in halloween costumes and I’ve just been given a big project with not much direction at all. Basically, we’ve just had programming make up a excel spreadsheet of all 5,000 costumes that’s broken down each costume by size. As instructed, I broke it down by children, adult, male, female, and have quantity of unique costumes we have for each size in each category. The spreadsheet also has quantity sold for 2009, 2008 and 2009 YTD figures. I also have access to profitability figures for each costume. Also made a ranking for each size in each costume (“Large Adult Buzz Lightyear” is highest selling, “medium Adult Buzz Lightyear” is second highest etc) and trying to look for patterns. This is all well and fine, but I’m going be presenting this stuff to the CEO soon, and I don’t want to get up there and be telling him a bunch of stuff he probably already knows. Anyone have any ideas of what I can do to, well, wow the pants off of my superiors with my “outside the box thinking” and analytical super powers? Just looking for some analytical ideas I can do with this size project, that may actually be useful to the company. I’m just not sure where else to go with this project.
Tell him to launch the Antoine Dodson costume this year. Instant hit. In all seriousness, try to run some analysis on when costume sales are the highest? Are there inventory problems ever? Perhaps see if you can find a lower limit threshold to ensure that sales do not suffer if inventory gets snatched up during a busy period.
trend analysis definitely called for here. are adult male costume sales increasing at a higher pace than kids? if so, why? What are the drivers of costume sales? with halloween coming up, need to make sure you have inventory to supply the spike in demand. what kid TV shows are popular now? I know a few years ago, people at my company were going nuts trying to find last minute adult costumes for The Man in Yellow, whatever that is… No one had them, including the large internet costume purveyors. I am guessing these are some of the questions the CEO will want answers to.