Nike recently acquired Celect, a retail predictive analytics and demand sensing firm based in Boston. Celect is Nike’s latest acquisition fuelling its consumer direct offense strategy, serving consumers personally at a global scale. Celect, founded in 2013, holds a cutting-edge intellectual property portfolio across data science and software engineering. Celect’s cloud-based analytics platform provides proprietary insights that allow retailers to optimise inventory across an omni-channel environment through hyper-local demand predictions, according to Nike.
Nike is a designer, marketer, and distributor of authentic athletic apparel, footwear, and accessories. Celect’s team will immediately be integrated into Nike’s global operations team and its co-founders will continue as tenured professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, consulting Nike on an ongoing basis.
“With the acquisition of Celect, Nike greatly accelerates our digital advantage by adding a platform developed by world-class data scientists. As demand for our product grows, we must be insight-driven, data optimised and hyper-focused on consumer behaviour. This is how we serve consumers more personally at scale,” Eric Sprunk, Nike Chief Operating Officer said. “We’re thrilled to be joining the Nike team, adding our unique and innovative capabilities to the data and analytics foundation they’ve been building over the years,” John Andrews, Celect CEO said.
