Ecometry and GERS Retail Systems Combine to Form Escalate Retail

Furniture World Magazine

Retail, E-Tail and Direct Marketing solution provider Ecometry Corporation and GERS Retail Systems, the San Diego-based leading provider of planning, merchandising and supplier collaboration software solutions announced the combination of their organizations. The transaction was funded by Bay area private equity firm Golden Gate Capital. The combined organization is named Escalate Retail reflecting the focus on improving retailer profitability through customer-focused solutions. By combining the front-office strengths of Ecometry, customer-interaction and loyalty, with GERS strengths in merchandise planning and execution, the company will provide retailers advanced capabilities to meet their customer demands across channels. The newly formed company will be led by CEO Stewart Bloom, President John Marrah, and CFO Michael Larkin. The company will have headquarters in San Diego and Delray Beach. Six additional satellite offices are located across North America and in Europe. "We are excited about our ability to bring integrated and customer focused solutions to the industry," said Stewart M. Bloom, CEO of Escalate Retail. "The synergies created by merging GERS and Ecometry into a significant new entity, Escalate Retail, have immediate benefit to our current customers and create a compelling new option for retailers who are looking for a unique technology partner to help with their business growth agenda." Market analysts see significant growth potential for the combined offering as retailers demand market choices other than monolithic ERP applications and isolated point solutions. Additionally, no other vendor has made customer intelligence available, across all customer touch-points and in back-office merchandise and planning applications. "After analyzing opportunities in the market for over a year, we are very excited to join forces with GERS," said John Marrah, President of Escalate Retail. "We are both committed to the goal of delivering highly extensible retail solutions that can be delivered individually or as a comprehensive suite." Escalate Retail has over 650 retail clients across North America and Europe. Current clients include Home Depot, Williams Sonoma, Nordstrom, Hot Topic, Sainsbury, Harry Rosen, Louis Vuitton, Blue Fly, Z Gallerie, Brooks Brothers, Saks, Lamps Plus, Sony and Raymour & Flanigan. "Hot Topic uses GERS solutions for merchandising, inventory management and analytics and Ecometry’s Blue Martini solutions for e-commerce, online order management, loyalty programs, and marketing analytics" said Tom Beauchamp, CIO for Hot Topic. "The consolidation of these two, highly customer-centric solution providers provides opportunities for Hot Topic to leverage our current investments. The application portfolio of the combined company will provide more efficient integration of applications across our enterprise, both in-store and on-line, ultimately creating an even more satisfying shopping experience for our customers across all sales channels." For more information, visit www.ecometry.com or www.gers.com. About Ecometry: Ecometry Corp. is the premier provider of customer-focused software solutions for direct- and multi-channel commerce. Its products include the Blue Martini software, which enables multi-channel retailers to increase same-store sales, boost e-commerce revenue and drive customer loyalty, and the Ecometry Commerce Suite, which is a high-volume suite of business applications designed to completely automate the front- and back-end operations of multi-channel retailers. About GERS: GERS Retail Systems is a leading supplier of software solutions for consumer-centric retailing. By facilitating the real-time flow of transactions and information across the entire retail organization, our solutions enable retailers to consistently anticipate, understand, and fulfill their customers' expectations for products that are priced, located, and timed to provide the optimal shopping experience. GERS solutions manage the merchandising life cycle, multi-channel selling, planning, business intelligence, and supply chain synchronization to create a great customer experience. About Golden Gate Capital: Golden Gate Capital (www.goldengatecap.com) is a San Francisco-based private equity investment firm with $2.6 billion of capital under management. Golden Gate is dedicated to partnering with world class management teams to invest in change-intensive, growth businesses. They target investments of up to $100 million in situations where there is a demonstrable opportunity to significantly enhance a company’s value. The principals of Golden Gate have a long and successful history of investing with management partners across a wide range of industries and transaction types, including leveraged buyouts, recapitalizations, corporate divestitures and spin-offs, build-ups and venture stage investing.