// data case study · retail analytics
Larry’s Secret: retail sales dashboard
Larry’s Secret is a five-store clothing chain around Boston. Larry needed to know where to focus: which stores and products were pulling their weight, what his customers bought together, and whether a loyalty discount would help or just give away margin. He shared four weeks of register receipts from April 2012 and asked for a dashboard that answers three questions:
- Which stores and products drive revenue and margin?
- What do customers buy together?
- Which loyalty customers should get a discount, and how big?
Apr 2–28, 2012 · 5 stores · 8 products · 7,890 transactions
- Revenue
- $1,176,469
- 4 weeks
- Gross margin
- 49%
- $576k gross profit
- Transactions
- 7,890
- 17,551 units
- Average basket
- $149
- 2.2 items
- Loyalty share
- 14%
- of transactions
Daily revenue
Peak day: Saturday, April 7, $71,620.
Revenue by store
All five stores, largest first.
Where loyalty customers live
Home zip codes with 3 or more loyalty customers, all stores.
- Cambridge22 customers$53k
- Westport9 customers$55k
- Waban7 customers$166k
- Newton6 customers$90k
- Boston5 customers$109k
- Somerville5 customers$47k
Town boundaries: MassGIS (Bureau of Geographic Information). 166 customers in zip codes with fewer than 3 are not shown. Income is average gross income from Massachusetts demographic data by zip code.
// then → now
From the first version to this one
- Static Tableau sheets → one interactive page with shareable filters
- Hard-coded discount tiers → a live what-if simulator
- Charts readable by screen readers, with data tables and keyboard access
- Dark and light themes, phone to desktop
- Customer data anonymized and aggregated before publishing
What this gives Larry: a single view to compare stores, plan bundles around products bought together, and test discount rules before rolling them out.
Data: Larry’s Secret case-study sales data from the Business Intelligence class at UMass Boston. Aggregated and anonymized; 554 duplicate lines removed.