Spot AI improved operations in All Star Elite, a rapidly growing retailer of sports jerseys, jackets, and other apparel operating out of 80 shopping centers in the U.S. Since early 2023, they’ve reduced cash shrink from 6% to 1%, improved investigation speed by over 50%, and increased sales figures by 5–15%.
Challenge 1: High shrink percentage
Before Spot AI, All Star Elite had a high merchandise shrink percentage, between 10% and 15%. They also faced a major cash shrink of about 6%.
The company had a mix of different software and hardware solutions for cameras and loss prevention processes. Video systems were clunky and hard to access remotely, while investigations were documented in spreadsheets and notes apps. These disparate systems made it difficult to manage incidents, keep track of investigation statuses, and improve overall KPIs.
Solution 1: All-in-one loss prevention solutions
Spot AI helped All Star Elite unify its cameras, loss prevention, and video analytics tooling. They have reduced their merchandise shrink percentage from between 10% and 15% to about 6% and cash shrink from 6% to 1%. They did this using three key features:
- Cases: All Star Elite centralized its investigations using Spot AI’s built-in Cases feature. Loss prevention team members collaborate on investigations, attach video clips, annotate videos, upload documents, and share with law enforcement or insurance. This made investigations 50% more efficient overall and helped reduce timelines for cases involving law enforcement from two to three months to one month.
- AI search: The loss prevention team can find and resolve loss incidents in minutes, instead of hours. Finding footage quickly is vital for the team which depends on speed to recover maximum asset value.
- Premium camera hardware: All Star Elite decided to replace many existing cameras with Spot AI’s included 5 MP IP cameras for full store coverage in high resolution. They use camera health dashboards and alerts to ensure everything is online when it counts. They’ve minimized blind spots and now have full video context to address loss issues wherever they arise.
“The ability to formalize our incident reporting, have all our cases on one database, and attach videos to those cases has been a game changer for our team. Spot AI has been just an awesome tool for us: cameras, case management, and people counting...it's great having that all in one system”
Andrew Gonzalez, Corporate Director of Loss Prevention and Safety
Challenge 2: Missed revenue opportunities
Before Spot AI, All Star Elite didn't have insight into how product placement affects customer behavior, which made it difficult to maximize revenue opportunities. The company knew that its Kobe Bryant “Mamba” jerseys were one of its biggest sellers, but didn’t know how placement of the item within their stores would affect traffic to other key areas.
Solution 2: Real-time insight into customer behavior
Spot AI gave All Star Elite real-time insight into its product placement and customer behavior, which has helped the company optimize store layouts.
With Spot AI, the company found which placements drove the most traffic to other products that drive higher average transaction values. Each site has a different layout that leads to different optimal placements for best sellers. For example, the team tested placing best sellers further back in the store, monitoring Spot AI data to ensure that store traffic didn’t drop off and see where else in the store customers went. Ultimately, the All Star team found that using Spot AI data to optimize merchandising led to sales increases of 5% to 15%.
"When we figure out the correct placement of our Kobe jersey within the store, that typically increases sales by 5% to 15% because we're able to pull traffic into other areas, and get ideas on other products that pair it with.”
Andrew Gonzalez, Corporate Director of Loss Prevention and Safety
Challenge 3: Understanding over- vs underperforming locations
All Star Elite is agile about store opening and closure decisions. While most All Star Elite locations have strong sales figures, a few lagged. Executives wanted to better understand the underlying reasons for particularly good and bad store performance. People counting data, in-store conversion rates, and traffic flows were key to this understanding.
Solution 3: Spot AI Intelligence Dashboards
Using People Counting Dashboards, executives could clarify whether store performance could be attributed to staffing numbers, staff performance, merchandising, seasonality, store location within a shopping center, or other factors.
The team identified the underlying reasons behind poorly performing store locations and proactively closed three stores that had declining foot traffic over time.
"We could quickly see a trend that was going to lend itself to not being profitable in the near future. Those are three stores that probably would’ve existed for another year at a loss. But we caught it early because of the metrics from Spot AI.”
Andrew Gonzalez, Corporate Director of Loss Prevention and Safety
Conclusion
All Star Elite has been able to improve its loss prevention and operations significantly with the help of Spot AI. By centralizing security cameras, case management, and video analytics into one easy-to-use cloud dashboard, Spot AI drove major improvements in company-wide shrink, sales, and strategic decision-making.
“Spot has brought to our forefront nothing but good things. I feel we're really getting our money's worth, and there’s still a lot more that we could do with this.”
William Heard, Director of Asset Protection
