Nike, Inc. (NYSE: NKE), a near Beaverton, Oregon-based designer, marketer and distributor of athletic footwear, apparel, equipment and accessories for a wide variety of sports and fitness activities, acquired Celect, a Boston, MA-based retail predictive analytics and demand sensing company.
The amount of the deal was not disclosed.
The acquisition aims to expand Nike’s Consumer Direct Offense strategy, serving consumers personally at a global scale.
Commenting on the transaction, Eric Sprunk, NIKE’s Chief Operating Officer, said: “As demand for our product grows, we must be insight-driven, data optimized and hyper-focused on consumer behavior. This is how we serve consumers more personally at scale.”
Founded in 2013 and led by John Andrews, CEO, Celect provides a cloud-based analytics platform that gives proprietary insights to enable retailers to optimize inventory across an omnichannel environment through hyper-local demand predictions.
Celect holds an intellectual property portfolio across data science and software engineering.
The company’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.
FinSMEs
07/08/2019