NIKE, Inc. has acquired Celect, a leading retail predictive analytics and demand sensing firm based in Boston. Nike hopes to use Celect to boost 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 optimize inventory across an omnichannel environment through hyper-local demand predictions.
“With the acquisition of Celect, Nike greatly accelerates our digital advantage by adding a platform developed by world-class data scientists,” said Eric Sprunk, NIKE, Inc. chief operating officer. “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.”
Celect’s team will immediately be integrated into Nike’s Global Operations Team. Its co-founders will continue as tenured professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and will consult Nike on an ongoing basis.
“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,” said John Andrews, Celect CEO.
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