Retail North

The company

Retail North is a wholesale distributor of dry-herb vaporizers and smoking accessories. It supplies about 240 independent head shops, dispensaries, and specialist retailers across the UK and Ireland. It carries Arizer, Storz & Bickel, PAX, DynaVap, Tinymight, and XMAX. Its direct-to-consumer storefront, Herbalize Store, serves as a shop window for the brands it distributes.

After 11 years in business, wholesale accounts drove close to 90% of revenue. A wholesale order averaged about £6,600, against roughly £480 online. Retail North came to By the Numbers as a profitable, growing business that had outgrown the tools it ran on.

The problem

Retail North had data: a Shopify admin, exports, and a shared workbook the commercial director rebuilt by hand every Monday. That rebuild took about six hours a week. The problem was that the numbers it read were wrong in a way that was hard to see from inside a spreadsheet.

Two businesses were averaged into one. Wholesale orders were more than ten times the size of storefront orders and ran on different buying cycles. Average order value described neither business. Repeat rate looked healthy because wholesale accounts reorder by nature, which hid weaker retention on the storefront.

The blending also broke the best-seller list. One retailer stocking a pallet of a SKU counted the same as forty stores selling through the same line. The top-sellers report measured a few large accounts' stocking decisions, and purchasing placed supplier bets against it.

The cost showed up in both directions. Retail North made a large buy on a line that turned out to be one account's one-off order, and the stock sat. In the same period, the Storz & Bickel Mighty+ Medic was rising across a broad base of retailers. It went oversold for nine days, with two more top-20 SKUs out of stock behind it.

The same blind spot hid customers. Wholesale accounts order on irregular cycles, so an account that had stopped buying looked like one that was not due yet. Thirteen high-value retailers went more than six months without ordering before anyone noticed. Retail North estimated the combined cost of misdirected buying, stockouts on rising lines, and lapsed accounts at around £600,000 a year.

Why Retail North chose By the Numbers

Retail North compared three options: a customer cohort and retention tool, a BI dashboard built on a data warehouse, and By the Numbers. Three criteria decided it.

Wholesale and storefront read separately. Two business models shared one dataset, so blended averages were the core problem. Sales reporting by channel splits revenue by where each order was placed, so wholesale draft orders and online store orders read as separate businesses. The cohort tool Retail North evaluated treated wholesale and storefront customers as one population.

Customer and product signals on the same data. Knowing which accounts were lapsing was half the answer. The other half was which products sold across many retailers, which depended on one account, and how many days of stock each line had left. By the Numbers puts customer segments, product reports, and inventory demand on the same Shopify data. The retention tool did not cover stock, and the BI stack could model both only after an analyst defined it.

Time to value in days. Retail North has no data engineer, so a six-week BI implementation ruled that option out. By the Numbers connected to its existing Shopify data with no engineering work.

Implementation

Setup was self-directed and took one afternoon. The Shopify connection was live in under an hour. By the next morning, By the Numbers had imported Retail North's full order history, so the first reports the team opened were built on its own ordering behavior.

The commercial director owned the rollout, with no developer involved. One support conversation tuned the loyalty thresholds to wholesale ordering cycles instead of the defaults. Nine days after install, the first reactivation campaign went out to the accounts By the Numbers had flagged.

Sales by Channel separated wholesale from the storefront before any other metric was read. Products Sold shows orders beside units for each product, and Product Velocity tracks order counts, so a line forty shops reorder stands apart from one pallet order. Product Momentum showed which lines were rising, and Inventory Demand showed how many days of stock each variant had left. The RFM loyalty matrix sorted accounts by last purchase and lifetime orders on a wholesale cycle. Customer Segments isolated the at-risk list and exported it for outreach.

The results

Splitting the channels changed purchasing first. Once demand read as sell-through across many retailers, Retail North cut the stock it bought on single-account orders from about £184,000 a year to £21,000. It moved that money to lines with multi-retailer momentum. The out-of-stock rate on its top 50 SKUs fell from 31% to 9%.

The customer side produced the largest number. By the Numbers flagged 13 high-value accounts in the At risk and Dormant groups, together worth about £642,000 in past yearly revenue. Retail North called each one over three weeks. Instead of a discount, each call offered stock on the lines that retailer had bought before, which product demand and account history in one place made possible. Nine of the 13 reordered within the quarter.

The weekly routine changed too. Monday's six-hour spreadsheet rebuild became a 25-minute review of an existing dashboard. Retail North spent nothing on paid acquisition during the period. It credits the growth to reading its own data correctly and selling to accounts it already had.

In their words

“The uncomfortable part was that our best-seller list had been wrong for years and it looked completely reasonable. One shop buying a pallet and forty shops selling through look the same on an export. We were making six-figure buying decisions off a number that was really just measuring what a couple of our biggest accounts happened to stock that month.”

“I'd been quoted six weeks and a contractor to get a BI dashboard standing up. I had this connected before lunch and was reading our wholesale and DTC numbers as two separate businesses the next morning. That was the moment it clicked — I'd never actually seen them apart before.”

What's next

Retail North is moving from quarter-end win-backs to scheduled account health reviews. It plans to use segment sync so accounts that cross a recency threshold are flagged within days, not at quarter-end. It is also piloting Inventory Forecast, which projects units per variant for the next 30 and 90 days, to time supplier orders. The goal is to bring top-50 stockouts under 5% before the fourth-quarter peak.