Treater: retail’s missing action engine
Treater is building the first action engine for retail. We’re reimagining how consumer goods brands, retail stores, and consumers sell and buy physical goods.
The retail industry is enormous and only growing. For many individuals, retail spend is the largest expense only behind shelter. People love shopping physically, and that’s why retail is growing 8% every year. Direct-to-consumer relies on retail at an accelerant.
And yet, managing retail has never been harder. Employee turnover is as an all-time high, with average tenure now at 3 years compared to 5 years less than a decade ago. Theft is increasing. 10K+ new brands enter the market every year, inducing more competition and more management overhead. Increasingly rapid changes in consumer preferences mean products must be developed, forecasted, shipped, and their performance measured faster than ever.
No one is able to keep up.
The high operational demands of retail have always existed. That’s why the industry spends $200 billion a year on retail execution — everything from making sure stores are ordering the right items, to ensuring all-important promotions are set up correctly, to measuring how often you pick up that snack next to the check-out aisle.
But the solutions to these operational demands are increasingly less efficient, and leave too much falling through.
Brands pay $20-$60 a pop to have people visit stores to check that items are in stock - an untenable cost once you’re in 10,000 stores across the country, unless you’re a household name. Even if you’re a household name, the majority of those store visits will have a negative return on investment. And store visits don’t solve what brands are really looking for - those hidden ways to increase sales 2x-3x across the board.
Retailers need to manage thousands of brands across a hierarchy of distribution. Many decisions are made unilaterally and require one person remembering to push a button, with little to no machine verification. Accurate, automated inventory and ordering systems are notoriously difficult, and do not account for a variety of human factors (theft, incorrect product scans) that leave shelves empty all too often. Store teams are expected to remember and make decisions about individual products in a cornucopia in a matter of minutes - but there are too many wonderful brands to keep in our heads.
Distributors, who move products between brands’ manufacturing facilities and retailers, also make many decisions via a single person’s push of a button with little verification. They operate on imperfect data, having to predict demand in the middle of two players who know it better - the brand and the store.
Consumers too often miss the products they love - how many times have you walked out of a store because it didn’t have the one thing you came for? The data says it’s 25% of the time or more.
Ultimately, too much falls through the cracks. And brands, who are built by passionate people absolutely in love with the products they are making, aren’t able to share it with the audience they deserve to.
The solution to today’s problems, and a future for retail, is clearer than ever to us.
We believe the retail industry is missing the platform to automate action. It shouldn’t take a week with dozens of in-person visits to discover that shipments for promotions aren’t coming through. It shouldn’t take a 10-conversation email with 5 stakeholders to make sure a product is scheduled to be sold at a store.
Treater is building this missing action engine. We believe this is the first time in history that we could do so - thanks to AI as an engine for manipulating unstructured data, and changes in how data is shared in the industry. And it’s the most important time to do so - given the magnitude of impact such an engine would have for retail.
We believe that retail’s action engine will lift up everyone in the space. It will increase the $30 trillion retail market 15% lost through the cracks today. We’ll let you do the numbers, but that’s a huge market no matter what commission you take.
But more importantly, it will enable brands and retailers to focus more on what they do best - delighting consumers - and enable consumers to enjoy the brands they love any time they want.
The nitty-gritty of making sure stuff gets on the shelf shouldn’t be so hard. Treater is going to make it trivial.
We’re well-funded, based in New York, and our team consists solely of people who know what it takes to get it done. We’ve previously worked at places among Google, McKinsey, D. E. Shaw, Lyft, The Wall Street Journal, and have been first hires or early-stage employees at other startups.