In partnership with
mornin’ merrymakers 📊🚩📉🚦🧮…🫠
every morning millions of people receiving reporting on the prior day’s performance.
dashboards built in spreadsheets, pdfs, & increasingly more with ai.
if you work in retail, the reporting is on revenue. traffic. ticket count. labor %. unit sales. inventory turn. a tab for nps. another for AOV. someone on the team built a "product mix by day part" view last quarter that nobody uses, but it's still there. a district manager is asking about a return rate spike in store 4.
you scroll. you skim. you screenshot a number into slack. you close the tab.
& the question you came in to answer,
is the business healthy?
sits there… only kinda answered.
i've watched happen at every brand i've worked with. operators don't have a metrics problem.
operators have a metrics priority problem.
40 numbers on the wall. 2 they act on. & the 2 they pick are usually the ones that feel urgent in the moment (or worse, the ones they most understand), not the ones quietly predicting next quarter's misses.
thankfully this is very solvable & i’ve made a cheatsheet to help you out with this asap.
in today’s letter, you'll learn:
→ the store 6: what your store managers should obsessively tracking
→ the fleet 5: what corporate should review weekly & monthly
→ the cadence: when to review what & who owns it
this is how it shows up in operator life:
you celebrate a record sales month. then you look closer to find that traffic was flat, conversion dropped, & your team hit the number by burning labor. that's not a win. this is an early warning of major problems.
your district managers are coaching store leaders against a 2% AOV miss, while traffic is down 8% & nobody's mentioned it for three weeks.
the ceo asks "how are we doing?" & you guess which three numbers to lead with. because you don't have a clean answer to which numbers run this business.
none of these are operator failures.
they're priority failures. & they're predictable.
the better the tools get, the more ai does our jobs, the harder prioritization gets. these stats prove my point:
+60% of enterprise data goes unused for analytics, according to forrester. most companies are paying $$$ to collect, track, & report on data that never moves a decision (or doesn’t even get looked at).
newvantage partners, now wavestone, has been tracking data leadership for more than a decade. in its 2024 survey, nearly 78% of data leaders said the main barrier to becoming data-driven was culture, people, process, & organizational alignment, not technology.
80% of analytics initiatives fail to deliver business outcomes according to gartner: most enterprise dashboards die within months of launch. teams build them, present them once, then stop opening them.
the famous "jam study" where shoppers that were shown 24 jam varieties were ~10x less likely to buy than those shown 6. more choice didn't help them decide. it froze them.
these are all saying we don’t have a dashboard problem.
we have accountability, education, & systems problems.
so i built the cheatsheet i wish i'd had when i was running fleets at apple & warby parker.
11 metrics. zero filler. each one comes with three things:
a clear definition: calculation & why it matters
a tiered benchmark: 🔴 bad / 🟡 good / 🟢 great / 🏆 elite, so you can self-diagnose where you rank in 30 seconds
the operator note: the gotcha most people miss, straight from my retail experience.
the aesthetically pleasing, meme enhanced notion page teaches you how to master retail metrics, specifically the store 6 & the fleet 5.
it's free. no opt-in, no gate. bookmark it, screenshot it, send it to your team.
shein bought everlane, breaking millennial hearts & only a matter of time before it breaks some primo real estate leases
gymshark will open its first “lifting club” gym in miami's wynwood neighborhood this summer.
primark plants a manhattan flagship, its 40th usa store
target quietly licensed all 72 stores in minnesota for thc drinks
harvey nichols turns its entire 4th floor into wellness with therapeutic beauty services & pilates in the clouds . the reformer gluttony continues.
p.s. want more retail guides? check out this page with all my freebies.
p.p.s. if you’re looking to take your analytics to the next level with accountability & automation, i highly recommend this ai coworker👇
A $200M+ DTC brand has 44 people messaging Viktor every day.
Their ops team built inventory command centers and reorder dashboards through Viktor. Supply chain gets daily stockout alerts before they happen. Marketing tracks ROAS and runs content calendars. CS has CSAT scores and support tickets triaged and briefed every morning in Slack, before the first support call. No dashboard digging.
48 internal apps, built through conversation. No code. No developer queue. Command centers, inventory dashboards, sales trackers, reorder systems.
That's one company. Across the platform, teams have built 2,000+ apps the same way: message Viktor in Slack, describe what you need, get a working tool deployed. No code. No six-week dev queue.
Your team doesn't wait for a product roadmap. They message a colleague.
5,700+ teams. SOC 2 certified.
"It was almost instantly adopted by the bulk of my team." — Boris Wexler, CEO, Space Dinosaurs