Case study · Specialty running retail

The revolution isn't coming. It's already here.

One retailer. Ninety days. $157,922.80 of dead capital pulled off the shelves — and when the marketing switched on, $2,100 of attributed revenue in fourteen days. Not a pilot. Not a roadmap. This already happened.

Book a Demo See the charts Figures from the retailer's own POS & RunOps data.

01 · The trend

Capital out. Revenue in.

Ninety days in two pictures. Six figures of cash walks off the shelves and back into the business — and the marketing line leaves zero the day it's switched on.

Inventory value on the floor

Total value of stock on hand, start and end of the 90-day window — straight from her POS.

−$157,922.80 of cash unlocked from stock that wasn't selling — a fifth of the whole position, back in her pocket to buy what does.

View as table

Inventory value as reported by her POS. RunOps never writes to the register — every order, markdown and transfer was approved by her first.

Marketing revenue — from a standing start

Cumulative revenue attributed to RunOps campaigns, from the day the module was switched on.

+$2,100 in fourteen days, from a list she already had and had never once emailed. Day 0 was a standing start.

View as table

Attributed revenue = purchases by campaign recipients matched back to the send. Plotted from the measured start and end of the first fortnight.

02 · Immediate impact

You activate. It works that week.

There is no implementation project. No six-month rollout, no data-cleanup phase, no "that's on the roadmap for Q3." RunOps reads your POS on day one and starts producing work you can act on — the customer list was already built before the first campaign was sent.

Day 0

Connected

POS syncs read-only. The customer file builds itself from transaction history — no CSV import, no double entry, no list-building sprint.

Day 4

Paid for itself

Attributed campaign revenue passed the monthly subscription before the first week was out.

Day 90

Six figures freed

$157,922.80 of working capital back off the shelves — the full ledger is below.

No onboarding project No data migration No new headcount No "coming soon"

The platform paid for itself many times over.

RunOps Core is $1,500 to set up and $500 a month at base — $7,500 for a full first year. Set that against what the first ninety days actually returned. This isn't a projection or a modeled ROI: it's her inventory line and her campaign revenue, against the published price on our own pricing page.

What it costs

RunOps Core, base pricing

Setup ~~One-time, per account~~$1,500

Subscription ~~$500/mo base × 12 months~~$6,000

First year, all in$7,500

What the first 90 days returned

Her numbers, from the sections above

Capital freed from inventory ~~90 days~~$157,922.80

Attributed campaign revenue ~~First 14 days of marketing~~$2,100.00

Returned in one quarter$160,022.80

0×

A full year of the platform, covered twenty-one times over — by the inventory line alone, in ninety days. $157,922.80 of freed working capital against $7,500 of first-year cost at Core base pricing. The marketing revenue is on top of that, and the ninety days aren't over — they're the first ninety.

4 days

Marketing alone covered the month

$2,100 of attributed revenue over fourteen days runs at about $150 a day. The $500 monthly base was covered before the first week was out — and that's one module of the platform.

$500/mo

Against the nine bills it replaces

Scheduling, reviews, CRM, email, time clock, event registration and the AP work were already costing a shop this size roughly $47,000 a year. See pricing →

Base pricing shown: RunOps Core is $500/mo covering up to $500K of inventory at cost, +$100/mo per additional $100K above that, so a larger position pays more than the base — even doubled, the first-year cost is still a fraction of what came back. Freed inventory capital is a one-time release, not recurring revenue; attributed campaign revenue is revenue, not margin. Your numbers will be your own.

03 · What we did

Read the register. Then do the work.

Every number above came from the same spine: one system that sees the inventory, the sell-through and the customer at once — and hands back the order, the markdown and the campaign already drafted.

Bought against sell-through

Fill-ins and reorders drafted from live sell-through against her open-to-buy — money going back into what moves, not a repeat of last season.

Surfaced the dead stock

What hasn't turned gets a name, a number and a recommended markdown or transfer — the slow bleed a POS report never shows you.

Marketed to who already bought

One customer record per shopper, RFM and lifecycle segments rebuilt nightly, campaigns drafted off the same inventory data and sent from her own domain.

RunOps fill-in order screen with per-item AI reasoning for each recommended quantity

This is the screen that moved the inventory line: every recommended quantity comes with the sell-through that justifies it, so she is approving decisions rather than building spreadsheets.

Same team. Same floor. Different business.

Nothing about the store got bigger. The back office behind it did.

Before

$813,678.80 of inventory on the shelves, a growing share of it not turning.
Reorders written by hand, from gut feel and a POS export.
A customer list trapped in the register, never marketed to.
Buying, marketing and labor decided in three different places, on three different sets of numbers.

After — 90 days on RunOps

$655,756.00 carried — $157,922.80 back in working capital.
Orders arrive drafted from live sell-through — she approves, the rep gets the email.
Every shopper is a customer record — segmented, marketed to, measured in dollars.
One spine. The campaign knows the inventory; the inventory knows the sell-through.

The receipts

Who: An independent specialty running retailer. Named details withheld at the owner's discretion.
Window: 90 days on RunOps for the inventory result; the first 14 days after launch for the marketing result.
Inventory source: Total inventory value as reported by her POS: $813,678.80 at the start of the window, $655,756.00 at the end. A decrease of $157,922.80, or 19.4%.
Marketing source: $2,100 of revenue attributed by RunOps to campaigns sent in the first two weeks the marketing module was live for her.
Pricing basis: Payback figures use published RunOps Core base pricing — $1,500 one-time setup plus $500/mo — for a $7,500 first year. Core scales at +$100/mo per $100K of inventory at cost above $500K, so a larger position pays more than base. See offerings.
What RunOps did: Read-only POS sync, AI-drafted fill-in orders and reorder/transfer recommendations, one unified customer record, automatic RFM & lifecycle segmentation, and AI-drafted email campaigns sent from her own domain.

Results are from a single RunOps customer over the periods described and are not a promise of future performance — your inventory position, sell-through and customer file are your own. RunOps reads from your POS; every order, markdown and campaign is approved by you before it goes out.

She isn't waiting for retail to catch up. Neither should you.

Connect your POS and watch the first ninety days. $1,500 to set up, $500 a month at base — and no part of this needs an implementation team.

Book a Demo See what it replaces

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