Background

Operating over 1,500 stores across the world, the ALDO Group, a global footwear company, periodically evaluates and refines its dynamic store network to align with customer preferences, secure optimal retail locations and serve the business strategically. As part of this ongoing assessment, the ALDO Group sought to better understand the impact of store openings and closures for its ALDO brand - not just on physical retail performance, but also on their e-commerce business.

Challenge

ALDO’s retail locations play a dual role: they are not only customer-facing stores but also operate as omnichannel centers for online orders (fulfilment, pickups, returns, etc). This operational setup means that any changes to ALDO’s store portfolio has potential ripple effects across both in-store and online channels. The ALDO team needed deeper insights to de-risk decisions around store locations, particularly understanding which stores play a critical role in supporting e-commerce activity. Opening stores is expensive. Closing the wrong store can be impactful.

Our Approach

We partnered with ALDO to provide a comprehensive view of each store's performance and its relationship to the local market.

Our solution included:

• Foot traffic analytics for each store
• Sales and transaction data at the local market level
• Demographic insights on consumers in the area
• Trade area analysis, showing where customers were coming from at the zip code level

One of the most impactful components for ALDO was the trade area data. By tying store visits to customer origin zip codes, we enabled ALDO to overlay our insights with their own e-commerce order data.

The Insight That Made the Difference

ALDO discovered that in some cases, a store’s trade area included a disproportionately high number of e-commerce customers. This meant that those stores were acting as key hubs for:

• Fulfilling online orders
• Handling in-store exchanges and returns of e-commerce purchases
• Supporting in-store pickups for online orders

Crucially, some of these trade areas were not covered by any other nearby stores. This helped ALDO identify locations that, despite somewhat underwhelming in-store metrics, were essential to the broader omnichannel experience.

Outcome – Better decision making with +25% more info

Using this integrated analysis, ALDO was able to:

• Examine a strategic sub-set of their Store network representing +$9M in revenue
• Realize that there was a further +25% of Ecom “halo” revenue connected to these specific stores
• More granularly understand that the store with the greatest impact had a +50% halo and the least impacted store had only +9%

“pass_by’s trade-area insights helped us to understand the full impact of our store network, not just in terms of store foot traffic, but how each venue supports our broader e-commerce strategy. It gave us the confidence to make operational decisions that were reinforced by data, and helped us to properly optimize $9M-$11M of our revenue.” – Marc Chretien, VP Omnichannel Ops & Business Analytics

Conclusion

By combining our market intelligence with their internal data, ALDO gained a nuanced understanding of how individual stores fit into their omnichannel strategy. This collaboration helped them avoid decisions that might have negatively impacted their online performance - ultimately protecting revenue and customer satisfaction.