Founded by Kurt Johnston, a strategic pricing and assortment optimization expert that began his career in Home Depot and has designed, implemented, and/or managed optimization programs for an array of firms in virtually all segments of the retail landscape, Palette began with a simple question:

Why is this so damn hard?

Which, as simple questions often do, led to a lot of complex follow-up questions, answers, and... well... work. All of it revolving around some basic design goals:

1) Make It Less Expensive
As most veterans of retail can tell you, 20% of your effort drives 80% of your benefit. By breaking with the traditional approach that involves boiling the ocean for the tiniest scrap of information - that even when found rarely changes the narrative - Palette is able to find cost savings that it can pass to its clients. 

Further, this new approach made implementation almost non-existent, reduced the tax on IT resources, and set the foundation for Palette's Pilot Program to enable retailers to test the solution prior to signing an expensive contract and hoping it works. 

2) If People Want to Use Excel, Let Them
Most vendors hide from Excel, meanwhile serving you their recommendations in what amounts to a fancy version of a pivot table. This makes adoption harder, as users are forced to figure out how to use their interface and are often frustrated by how untouchable the data feels. 

Most approaches to solving the questions these vendors attempt to solve aren't other vendors - they are a mess of Excel files being juggled between two or more teams.

Users don't need a new program to learn, they just need what they're doing today to be done better. 

3) Make It for the Right People 
Most vendors target the design of their solutions for support teams. For Pricing, for Planning. But the vast majority of decisions over product within retail aren't owned by either of these teams, even in retailers fortunate enough to have a Pricing team at all.

They're owned by Merchants. The people who design the assortments season after season; the ones forced to make decisions on fragmented, erroneous information on a daily basis. The ones traditional vendors rarely, if ever, speak to. 

This is why Palette is a 'Strategic Pricing & Buy Optimization' system. Because strategy begins 9-12 months before goods land in a DC or on store shelves. Everything done once it's already arrived is too late. It's a band-aid, it's triage. 

Which is fine. First aid is important, too. 

But there's no way to get meaningful, long-term improvement if you never touch the buy cycle.