Founderwright for specialty retail
AI for multi-store specialty retailers. Every store on the same numbers.
One AI brain across your point of sale, inventory, schedules, and books, with tools built in-house around how your stores buy, move, and sell product. Store managers see what to fix today. You see every location, category, and dollar of stock in one place.
Private-equity-grade tools. Without giving up equity. Built by an operationally minded CFO, not a software vendor.
- Apparel & footwear
- Outdoor & sporting
- Home & furniture
- Gift shops
- Pet supply
- Garden centers
- Jewelry
- Beauty & cosmetics
Operator-CFO built
Not generic software. What a CFO would put in front of a retailer.
Founderwright is built by an operationally minded CFO. The numbers that grow a company organically are the same ones that make an acquisition work and hold up when you sell. Every build starts there: surfaced before you ask and ranked by dollar impact.
Sales by store
GMROI and weeks of supply by store and category
Inventory is your largest investment, so it’s measured like one.
Inventory on hand
Dollars at risk of markdown, flagged while a transfer still works
An early transfer beats a deep cut at the end of the season.
Payroll hours
Sales per labor hour against traffic, by store and daypart
Labor is the cost you can still change this week.
The same numbers carry a retailer through every stage: recovery, growth, acquisitions, and exit prep.
The morning brief
Surfaced before you ask. Ranked by what it’s worth.
Agents watch every connected system overnight. By morning, the issues that matter most are ranked, assigned, and drafted.
Friday, 7:10 a.m. · What the owner sees before the weekend rush
Ranked actions
From your own numbers, across every system- 1Move 36 pairs to the downtown storeTodayBest-selling boot out in two sizes · 3 stores overstocked
- 2Add a closer at the mall store SaturdayThis weekTraffic up 22% after 4 p.m. · conversion down 5 points
- 3Review 18 slow styles for markdownThis weekUnder 30% sell-through at 8 weeks · $41K at cost
- 4Fall open-to-buy tracking to planOn track$118K left to commit · receipts 2% under plan
Illustrative data. Every build is designed around your company’s own systems and numbers.
Voice notes that take action
Or just say it.
Between jobs, on the drive, or walking the floor: record a thought and the platform drafts the tasks, schedule changes, and answers. Nothing happens until you approve it. How voice notes work.
“Send the extra boots from the mall store downtown, add a closer at the mall on Saturday, and what’s sell-through on the fall line?”
- New taskMall store: transfer 36 pairs to downtown · confirm by noon
- RescheduleAdd a closer to Saturday’s mall schedule · manager approves
- AnswerFall line sell-through: 41% at 8 weeks · 18 styles under 30%
Illustrative. Nothing changes until you approve it.
Sound familiar
Retail margin is won store by store.
Stock sits in the wrong store
One location is sold out of the size everyone wants while another has a full shelf of it. Transfers happen when someone notices, usually after the weekend.
Markdowns come too late
Slow sellers get noticed at season’s end, when the only lever left is a deep discount. Weeks earlier, a transfer or a smaller cut would have moved them.
Schedules ignore the traffic
Shifts are built from last year’s template, not this week’s door count. Stores run thin during the Saturday rush and overstaffed on a quiet weekday morning.
Shrink is a count-day surprise
Losses show up at the physical inventory, long after the pattern started. By then nobody can tell whether it was theft, receiving errors, or bad paperwork.
What we’d build
What we’d build for a multi-store retailer.
Every tool is scoped in one conversation with you and built in-house to fit your stores, and each one is owned by you. It reads your actual transactions, items, receipts, and schedules from the first week, store by store.
Owner’s command center
Yesterday’s sales, margin, stock, and labor for every store and category, set against plan and last year. The biggest gaps rise to the top, and each one opens to the transactions behind it.
Store scorecards
Comp sales, conversion, average transaction, units per transaction, and labor as a share of sales for each store, so managers compete on the numbers you care about.
Inventory by location
On-hand, on-order, and in-transit stock for every store and the warehouse, by style, size, and color, with weeks of supply showing where you’ll run out first.
Transfers and replenishment
Agents suggest moves from stores with too much to stores about to sell out, draft the replenishment order, and assign each transfer to a manager to confirm.
Sell-through and markdowns
Sell-through by week since receipt for every style, with slow movers flagged early and markdown candidates proposed with the margin impact shown before anything is cut.
Open-to-buy planner
Planned sales, receipts, markdowns, and ending inventory by category and month, updated as the season sells, so buyers commit dollars with the current picture in front of them.
Labor against traffic
Door counts and sales by hour laid over the schedule, so managers staff the rush, trim the lulls, and see sales per labor hour before the week is over.
Shrink watch
Voids, returns without receipts, no-sale drawer opens, discounts, and count variances tracked by store, register, and employee, with unusual patterns turned into a review with an owner.
The compliance line
We build above the line. We connect to everything else.
In retail, the line runs under card processing at checkout, sales tax filings, payroll, banking, and the books. Buying, stock, store operations, and reporting sit above it, and all of it can be built around you.
Above the line
Built custom, in-house by Founderwright, around how you run. Owned by you.
Below the line
The regulated systems you’re required to keep. We read from them, and where they offer a write API, approved work is written straight back in.
Keep any tool you like. We integrate with it. Retailers often hold on to their point-of-sale system, online storefront, and loyalty program, and we’d build the planning, inventory, and store tools around them. See the systems we connect.
The build
How we’d build it for a multi-store retailer.
Follow product from order to sale
We start with how product moves through your business: how buyers plan the season, how receipts are allocated to stores, when stock gets transferred, how schedules are set, and which reports you read before the stores open.
Connect the point of sale
Your point-of-sale and inventory system is connected, and your first command center is running on real transactions, items, and stores, with comp sales and sell-through calculated from your own history.
Add traffic, labor, and the books
Door counters, schedules and time clocks, payroll, purchase orders, and the general ledger are added to the same brain, so conversion, sales per labor hour, and gross margin come from one source, store by store.
Build what the stores need
Next come the tools your buyers and managers have been improvising above the compliance line: open-to-buy, transfer planning, and markdown reviews. Each one is owned by you, and the add-ons it replaces can go.
The numbers it runs on
Your definitions. Measured the same way everywhere.
Every metric is defined with you once, tied back to the source systems, and checked by agents before anyone makes a decision on it.
Questions
What owners ask us.
Do we have to replace our point-of-sale system?
No. We connect it before anything else, and your staff keep using the register and inventory system they already know while transfers, open-to-buy, and store scorecards are built around it. When a planning workbook or reporting add-on above the compliance line has run its course, we replace it with software shaped around how you buy and sell.
Which retail systems sit below the compliance line?
Card processing at checkout, sales tax filings, banking, payroll and payroll tax, and the books of record. None of them is replaced. The brain reads from each one, and if a system has a write API, approved journal entries or vendor bills post straight back into it. Someone on your staff approves each write before it posts, and all of them land in an audit log.
How does it decide when to transfer stock?
Transfers are proposed from what each store has on hand, what it sold in recent weeks, what’s already on order, and how far apart the stores are. Rules you set, like minimum display quantities or a flagship that never gives up stock, are always respected. An agent drafts each move and assigns it to a manager, and nothing ships until someone approves it.
Do online orders count toward a store’s numbers?
You decide. Orders picked up, shipped from, or returned to a store can be credited to that location, to the web, or to both, using rules you set once. Inventory can be viewed as one pool, so a store’s stock can fill an online order before you reorder, and comp sales are reported with and without online.
If we stop working together, what do we keep?
Everything we built. The system is yours, from the store scorecards and transfer rules to the markdown logic and every record behind them. Grow it with us, or give it to someone on your staff to run. Walking away never means starting over, because nothing is locked in and nothing has to be rebuilt.
Start with one conversation.
Recovering, growing, buying, or getting ready to sell: tell us how your company runs. We’ll show you what it could run on.
Start a conversation logan@founderwright.com