Q&A with Dane Cohen

The Coastal Connections Conference is just around the corner, and if you haven’t made plans to attend yet, or are wondering what is in store, Seaside Retailer Executive Editor and Coastal Connections Conference Director Kristin Ely had a chance to connect with Keynote Speaker Dane Cohen, business development manager of Management One, to get some insights into the information he will be sharing during the keynote session.

“Mastering the Inventory Game,” kicks off the Oct. 22-24 event at Margaritaville Resort Orlando on Sunday at 3 p.m.

Cohen was a panelist at the last Coastal Connections Conference, and post-conference surveys indicated attendees wanted to hear more from him. He was invited back to deliver more insights to beach, coastal and nautical retailers attending the event.

“I am so excited to be back at the Coastal Connections Conference. I had an incredible time at the first one, and I hear there is more in store come this October. I cannot wait to be back with the community, and we have a lot more to share at this session,” he says. “I think the reason so many people connect to what we were talking about in that discussion is we are talking about the most important thing when it comes to retail, and that is cash and the bottom line and how to really move the needle. We find from each one of our presentations, that retailers can walk away and walk back to their store and really make some changes that will have an immediate impact.”

Cohen shares more about his background and the advice he plans to give retailers during the conference in the following excerpt from his interview with Ely.

Kristin Ely (KE): Could you start by telling us a little bit about your background and your role with Management One?

Dane Cohen (DC): I have a varied career in the retail and wholesale industry, which has all led me to Management One. I started my career back in the trade shows, so I’m no stranger to the fashion events and buying events of the industry. From there, I ran a wholesale business for a very successful fashion designer men’s brand in New York, and I did their global and domestic wholesale.

I then joined an independently owned department store where I was their director of retail working across buying, visual merchandising and hiring on the store level.

I’m currently at Management One. We are the largest provider of inventory planning and merchandise intelligence for retailers. And so what we are essentially doing is helping retailers have a full-scale understanding of how to be profitable through their inventory purchasing.

KE: How do you work specifically with customers to help them with their inventory and bottom lines?

DC: We do a lot, so I am going to condense it down to one word because I think it is the most important takeaway: budgets. Fifty-two percent of all your cash expenses will go right back into your inventory.
There is no more important place to have a budget than around your purchasing. So when you are going to market, when you are making replenishment orders, when you are making decisions about markdowns, we help retailers put together a road map to all these decisions through budgets.

Once you are on that inventory plan and really keeping track of how much is going out in cash, how much your sales are tracking to the plan, how much markdowns you are taking so that you can make sure that your gross margin and your maintained markup stays on track and where you need it to be in order to cover expenses — once you start making those decisions and viewing them through a strategic lens, there’s not many retailers out there who won’t see a shift in their business for the better.

KE: Tell us a little about what you plan to cover during the Coastal Connections Conference.

DC: We won’t be able to teach the extensiveness of an open-to-buy planning in one hour, but what we can get across in this session is what are the fundamentals to running a cashflow positive retail business, and there are a few beliefs that retailers hold onto that we want to challenge in this session.

And so just by making some slight tweaks in your thinking and your approach to buying, which again, can be implemented immediately on return — we hope there is an understanding behind the core principles behind buying with a budget and buying with the idea of cashflow in mind, not just margin.

When you look at topics like markdowns, margin, pricing, we’re going to say some pretty controversial but explainable methods to overcome cashflow issues in these areas.

KE: How will coastal retailers benefit from your presentation?

DC: I don’t want to share everything, but I will tell you one [thing]. Pricing. This is a huge area where we see people have walked away from our presentations with immediate changes in thoughts on their pricing, and that’s because we find that most vendors are pricing for their wholesalers and not for their bottom line.

And here’s the most interesting part about pricing: It is one of the few decisions you can make in your business that is pure bottom-line profit. So if tomorrow I go back to my store and I look at some of my merchandise and make a decision to raise retail prices by $1 here or $1 there, that is a pure profit play. Any dollar increase is going right back to your bottom line and there’s no cost to it.

Pricing is one of those areas we’re going to focus a lot of our attention on. And I would highly encourage any of the retailers that are coming to the conference that when they get back in their store that very next day, start thinking differently about pricing and use some of the principles we’ll talk about and watch how slight tweaks can really open up those bottom-line dollars.