Independent Retail Consulting · Bradenton, FL
Retail consulting built on 20+ years of real category ownership — specializing in category management, assortment optimization, planograms, retail analytics, and merchandising strategy.
About Niki Crow
I've sat in the buyer's chair. I've negotiated joint business plans, managed trade funding, built planograms from scratch, and analyzed POS data on a Monday morning to figure out why last week's number moved the wrong direction.
That's not a consulting pitch — it's the context I bring to every engagement. Twenty years across Meijer, Bealls Florida, and independent retail gave me a ground-level understanding of what actually drives category performance: not just data, but decisions.
Learn My StoryWhat I Do
Analyze performance, identify white space, optimize assortment architecture, and build category strategies that grow sales and margin.
Learn more →Develop data-driven assortment strategies that increase productivity, reduce redundancy, and improve relevance for your customer.
Learn more →Improve space allocation, product placement, and shelf efficiency. From localized planogram strategies to company-wide resets.
Learn more →Transform POS, syndicated, and internal data into actionable insights. Demand forecasting, financial planning, and performance diagnostics.
Learn more →Strengthen partnerships, improve negotiation positions, and build joint business plans that align vendor investment with your category goals.
Learn more →Promotional planning, seasonal assortment strategy, and go-to-market execution for new items, resets, and category initiatives.
Learn more →Career Experience
Every recommendation I make draws on two decades of actual buying, planning, and category leadership at scale.
Meijer — Grand Rapids, MI
November 2005 – May 2021 · 16 Years
Bealls Florida — Bradenton, FL
September 2022 – June 2024
Detwiler's Farm Market — Sarasota, FL
March 2025 – July 2025
Gifted Workshop — Cutlerville, MI
August 2021 – September 2022
Results & Case Studies
Case Study · Specialty Retailer
A regional specialty retailer was struggling to hold ground in toys as national chains compressed the category. Through assortment rationalization, localized planogram strategy, and promotional restructuring, the category achieved 4% growth while the broader market declined.
+4% Sales in Declining MarketCase Study · Emerging Category
Identified early demand signals for pickleball before mainstream adoption. Developed a focused assortment from entry-level to premium, tied to a targeted promotional calendar and demographic-specific store clusters.
+150% Category GrowthCase Study · Large Format Retail
Pioneered a store-by-store planogram approach for collegiate and sport-licensed hydration products, allowing each location to reflect local team loyalty. The strategy improved sell-through by reducing out-of-style inventory at season's end.
95% Pre-Markdown Sell-ThroughCase Study · Margin Optimization
Conducted a full category review for a high-volume seasonal department, identifying redundant SKUs, underperforming vendors, and promotional spending inefficiencies. Implemented a rationalized assortment and restructured trade funding terms.
10% YOY Revenue Growth · 3 SeasonsWhy Work With Me
Every recommendation comes from someone who has actually owned a category — not observed one from the outside. I know the pressure of a quarterly review, a vendor negotiation, and a failing promotion.
I work in Nielsen, Circana, SAS, and Power BI — but I translate data into plain decisions your team can act on. Insight without action is just a report.
I've sat across the table from Mattel, Hasbro, Samsonite, and hundreds of smaller suppliers. I know how to structure joint business plans that actually benefit both sides.
Whether you're a three-store independent or a 70-location chain, the category fundamentals are the same. I adapt the process to your scale, your tools, and your team.
"Good category management isn't about carrying more products — it's about carrying the right ones, in the right place, with the right story for your customer. Everything else is noise."— Niki Crow, Retail Consulting
How We Work Together
I work directly with you — no account managers, no junior analysts doing the work. You get an experienced category professional from day one.
30-minute conversation to understand your challenges, goals, and category landscape.
I dig into your data, assortment, planograms, and vendor setup to identify the biggest opportunities.
A practical, prioritized roadmap — built around what will actually move your business forward.
Ongoing advisory or hands-on project support through implementation and measurement.
Let's Talk
Whether you're a retailer looking to improve shelf performance or a brand seeking retail expertise, the first conversation costs nothing.
About Niki Crow
I started on the store floor at Meijer as an Operations Manager — learning inventory flow, planogram execution, and what it takes to run a department at 6am before the first customer walks in. That ground-level perspective never left me.
Over the next two decades, I worked my way into category management, eventually overseeing categories generating hundreds of millions in revenue. I've managed 10,000+ SKU assortments, negotiated trade funding in the millions, launched private label programs, and built planogram strategies tailored to individual store demographics.
Now I bring that experience to retailers and brands who need the perspective of someone who's sat in the seat — not just studied it.
Professional Photo
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Background
My academic foundation is in Finance and Economics from Western Michigan University — which gave me the analytical lens I'd spend two decades applying to retail. Category management is fundamentally a financial discipline: understanding margin contribution, inventory turn, promotional ROI, and space productivity.
At Meijer, I built P&L models for sub-categories generating over $400M in revenue. I managed $3M+ in annual vendor trade funding. I learned to read a forecast not as a spreadsheet but as a story — and to know when that story was about to take a bad turn.
I've worked across an unusually broad category spectrum: toys, crafts, tabletop, hardlines, pet, luggage, sporting goods, beauty, consumables, and center store grocery. That breadth gives me a cross-category perspective that most specialists never develop.
At Bealls Florida, I had to do more with less — 68 locations, a seasonal customer base driven by Florida's shifting demographics, and a market where the competition never sleeps. I grew toy sales 4% in a year the national market declined. I grew pickleball 150% by identifying demand before it was obvious.
At Detwiler's Farm Market, I got close to independent retail: optimizing across multiple distributors in a small-format environment where every square foot of shelf space has to earn its place.
All of that experience — corporate, regional, independent — is what I bring to consulting engagements. I don't offer one playbook. I build strategies that fit your actual business.
Beyond Retail
I believe the best business relationships are built on something more than deliverables. Here's a little more of who I am.
I'm based in Bradenton, Florida — which is why you'll find I understand Florida retail in ways that consultants parachuting in from Chicago don't. I know the seasonal customer, the snowbird demographic shift, and the year-round humidity that affects everything from category planning to in-store execution.
When I'm not thinking about shelf productivity, I'm usually doing something with my hands — or something that forces me to slow down and look closely at the world.
I took geology courses alongside my finance degree and never lost the fascination. Today I practice lapidary arts — cutting and polishing stones. There's something about finding the structure underneath the surface that maps well to category work.
Ceramics requires patience, feel, and the willingness to start over when something isn't working. Occasionally, so does category management.
A complex LEGO build is an exercise in following a system precisely — then deviating from it when you have a better idea. Category management at its best works the same way.
I volunteer with animal rescue organizations. It's one of those commitments that has nothing to do with business — and everything to do with what kind of person I want to be.
Work With Me
The first call is a conversation — no pitch, no pressure. Let's figure out if there's a fit.
Schedule a Discovery CallServices
I offer project-based and retainer engagements across six core service areas. Every engagement is structured around your actual needs — not a pre-packaged methodology.
Service 01
Full-cycle category strategy from diagnosis to execution.
Most retailers know their categories aren't performing as well as they should. The harder question is why. I start every category engagement with a thorough diagnostic — looking at sales trends, margin contribution, velocity by SKU, space productivity, and how the assortment compares to market data.
Then I build a strategy: what stays, what goes, what gaps are worth filling, and how to sequence changes without disrupting the business mid-season.
Service 02
Right products. Right stores. Right depth.
Assortment decisions are among the highest-leverage choices a retailer makes — and among the most frequently made on intuition rather than data. I bring a structured, data-first approach to rationalization and expansion: what your customers are actually buying, what you're missing, and where redundancy is silently eroding your margins.
I have experience optimizing assortments from 500-SKU specialty sets to 10,000+ SKU general merchandise departments, across formats ranging from small-format independents to large-format chains.
Service 03
Every linear foot has a job to do.
A planogram is more than a shelf map — it's a sales strategy encoded in physical space. I've built planograms for departments ranging from basic grocery staples to complex licensed merchandise with store-by-store variation, using Blue Yonder Space Planning and related tools.
My approach connects the planogram directly to the category strategy: the position of every product on the shelf reflects its role, its velocity, and its contribution to the overall department. And I train your team to maintain it.
Service 04
Turning data into decisions.
Most retail operations have more data than they know what to do with. I help organizations stop swimming in spreadsheets and start using their data to make faster, more confident decisions.
I work with POS data, syndicated sources (Nielsen, Circana), internal ERP systems, and planning platforms (SAS, SAP, Blue Yonder, MicroStrategy, Power BI) to build the analytical frameworks that drive category decisions, inventory planning, and financial performance management.
Service 05
Vendor relationships that actually work in your favor.
I've sat across the table from Mattel, Hasbro, Samsonite, Vera Bradley, and hundreds of smaller suppliers — so I know exactly how vendors approach negotiations, where there's room to move, and what levers actually drive better terms and better category support.
I help retailers prepare for line reviews, structure joint business plans, and negotiate trade funding arrangements that are tied to measurable category outcomes rather than just gross spend.
Service 06
Promotional and seasonal execution that drives results.
Category strategy without an execution plan is just theory. I help retailers translate category direction into promotional calendars, seasonal assortment plans, and in-store merchandising programs that convert traffic into sales.
This includes new item launch strategy, go-to-market planning, omnichannel alignment, and the kind of promotional structure that builds consistent lift without eroding base margin.
Get in Touch
No pitch, no pressure. Just a conversation about where you are, where you want to go, and whether I'm the right person to help you get there.
I work with retailers and brands across the country, primarily remotely with occasional on-site engagements. The best place to start is a 30-minute discovery call.
Typical Engagement Types
Project-based engagements · Monthly retainer advisory · Category reviews · Interim category management support · CPG retail strategy
Tell me a little about your business and what you're working on.