Australia’s #1 pet retailer advances automation and store planning with Crisp

Petbarn clawed back weeks of manual planogram work, and revisions across hundreds of stores now takes 30 minutes with Crisp.

Best in shelf results

3 Weeks to 1 Day To build complex planograms

240+ Automatic planogram updates processed per hour

30 Minutes To apply updates across hundreds of stores

Moving from deadlines to performance

Petbarn operates 267 stores across Australia and has been expanding quickly, opening 13 new stores in the last fifteen weeks. Behind each of these modern pet superstores is a complex space-planning operation, with planograms stretching up to 70 bays. From dog and cat nutrition to aquatic and reptile care, every shelf and range (a.k.a. assortment) decision needs to be built, versioned, and executed accurately.

Before Petbarn adopted Crisp, manual planogram production for pet food alone – which includes fresh and frozen cooler products – consumed up to 120% of one Space Planner’s time. With Crisp, that workload has been dramatically reduced – freeing the team to spend more time on merchandising and store-ready execution.

“You could say Crisp has made our job 70% more enjoyable,” joked Senior Space Planner Wadieh Sawires.

Expansion without friction

The space-planning team at Petbarn – a business unit of Green Cross Pet Wellness – manages planograms for a fast-growing store network. All of these require significant analysis and revisioning when resets occur every 6 to 9 months. With discontinued products, and numerous new product introductions each period, there simply isn’t time to open and edit each file individually.

The evolution of pet categories wasn’t making the team’s job easier. Consumer demand for natural and super premium pet food has grown steadily, alongside interest in newer treat, topper, and supplement trends. The volume of changes was growing faster than the team’s capacity to manage them without a better system.

“Do we find a solution, or do we increase headcount to work on more manual tasks?” reflected Rebecca Lalor, Space and Range Manager at Petbarn.

The team had a solid foundation with Blue Yonder’s CKB platform. What they needed was a solution that could automate large volumes of repetitive work at scale.

“With automation in place, Crisp helps us focus on the most profitable decisions for our individual stores.”

_{Wadieh Sawires, Senior Space Planner, Petbarn}

Planning excellence unleashed

Mass product changes are now processed in rapid succession across all planograms. When a category reset removes 50 discontinued products, Crisp handles the deletions across every planogram at once rather than requiring updates file by file.

New products entering the range are automatically positioned within the relevant brand block, giving the team a logical starting point to refine instead of beginning from scratch. These changes are always color-coded for clarity – new lines flagged in green, deletions in red.

A Tiles feature within the planogram workspace brings additional key metrics – sales performance, rankings, and stock levels – directly into view, so the team can make ranging decisions without switching between systems.

With hours of technical manual labor returned, the Petbarn planning team has shifted its focus toward merchandising decisions grounded in store-level sales insights.

“With automation in place, Crisp helps us focus on the most profitable decisions for our individual stores,” Wadieh shared.

“Before Crisp, we struggled to build planograms to hit a deadline. Now we’re building them to perform.”

_{Wadieh Sawires, Senior Space Planner, Petbarn}

New territories

Petbarn’s first planograms built with Crisp received the best store feedback the team has seen. The platform is now being rolled out to the entire space planning team, opening the door to planograms calibrated precisely to local consumer demand. As trends in the pet industry continue to evolve, Petbarn is positioned to act on them more quickly and accurately than ever before.

“Before Crisp, we struggled to build planograms to hit a deadline. Now we’re building them to perform,” concluded Wadieh. 

Build data confidence and command in-store execution with Crisp. Learn more about how we can help by speaking with an expert.