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Sander Roose is a serial entrepreneur, sports enthusiast, and founder & CEO of Omnia Retail. With well over a decade of retail experience, working on the retail side of Procter & Gamble to retail strategy consulting at Harvest and Commerce Squared, Sander loves puzzling through retail’s greatest challenges by combining strategy with technology. As CEO, he sets the course for Omnia and guides the company through strategic changes and growth. We sat down with Sander to ask him more about Omnia and where he thinks the world of retail is headed.
Can you tell us a little bit about Omnia and what you do?
Omnia Retail was founded in 2015 with one goal: to give people superpowers with powerful technology, and improve working life as a result. More specifically, we work with retailers and brands to help them take control of their online assortments, alleviate the pain of tedious manual labor in pricing and marketing, and plan for profitable growth.
Can you tell us a little bit about the history of Omnia? Where do you guys come from?
Before Omnia, I worked on the retail side of Procter & Gamble, and in 2010 I started out on my own and built a retail consultancy business. My co-founder, Herman de Jager, on the other hand, had run a company called Connective Power (CP) since the 1990s, focused on building software for retailers. We met in 2013 and decided to come together to build an advanced dynamic pricing platform, which we literally called Advanced Dynamic Pricing System, or ADPS for short.
Herman and I realized his knowledge of retail software and my understanding of retail strategy was a pretty awesome match. So ADPS naturally evolved. We ultimately merged and created an entirely new company called Omnia Retail. As Omnia we worked and developed our Dynamic Pricing tool and marketing automation capabilities.
I personally think our backstory is pretty interesting and sets us apart from many of our competitors. We have a rich history in retail innovation and strategy, and we truly understand how to help retailers hit their targets and grow their businesses.
What makes Omnia different from the competition? Why do your customers choose Omnia?
There are a few things that set us apart from the rest. The first is our deep retail expertise, which I mentioned above, and the fact that our product is based on years of retail knowledge. I genuinely believe that we have a deeper understanding of what retailers need than some of the other options out there.
Additionally, something that really sets Omnia apart is our customer-centric approach. We understand that our product will become part of your daily workflow, so we work with your team to make sure everyone understands how to get the most out of the product. We also periodically check in and help you understand how to improve your own processes.
A third thing that truly sets us apart is the ability for you to connect your pricing and marketing together. We see product pricing and product marketing as two halves of a whole. A sort of yin and yang. Our software lets you use insights from your marketing to adjust your pricing and vice versa. So you can always have the best price and optimized bids for your company.
What are your products?
We have four different products nestled into our full suite of tools.
Our Dynamic Pricing tool lets you set your strategy, choose your products, add your price elasticity and internal information, then sit back and relax as the algorithm automatically calculates and adjusts prices for every product in your assortment. This tool is the legacy of the Automated Dynamic Pricing System Herman and I created back in 2013. It’s our most popular product because it’s the most necessary for retailers and brands. Companies really do need a software to help them keep up with the market online.
In addition to Dynamic Pricing we have a more basic tool called Pricewatch, which is a competitor price tracker. It’s designed to help you track your product prices, compare yourself to the competition, and analyze historic market trends.
We also have a couple of online marketing automation tools, Dynamic Marketing and Feed Manager, that help retailers manage their marketing more effectively and reduce costly inefficiencies. We’re firm believers that your pricing and marketing are interconnected in modern e-commerce, so we’ve created tools that help you build better marketing campaigns based on pricing information and vice versa.
Why is pricing and marketing automation important?
The internet has completely revolutionized retail, essentially making the marketplace fluid in many ways. Every retailer with a webshop now has significantly more competitors, and the market price for products changes constantly. So today, retailers and brands need to follow your competitor’s price on a product, calculate a new price for your own product, then make that update. But if you have an assortment of thousands or millions of items — and several different competitors — it’s impossible to manage.
Dynamic pricing automates the tedious part of this process for you. It can track your competition, calculate the best price for your product based on the market average and your strategy, then automatically update your prices for you. This gives retailers and brands more time to focus on strategy, not chasing the market.
The same is true for marketing automation, our Dynamic Marketing tool. It really helps retailers get better returns on their PPC campaigns because they don’t need to stress about making sure they have all the information they need. Instead the program gathers all the information you need and comes up with the best bid possible, so retailers and brands can monitor performance and iterate from there.
About Omnia
Omnia was founded in 2015 with one goal in mind: to help retailers take care of their assortments and grow profitably with technology. Today, our full suite of automation tools help retailers save time on tedious work, take control of retail their assortment, and build more profitable pricing and marketing strategies. Omnia serves more than 100 leading retailers, including Decathlon, Windeln.de, Tennis Point, Bol.com, Wehkamp, de Bijenkorf, and Beauty Bay. For her clients, Omnia scans and analyzes more than 500 million price points, and makes more than 7 million price adjustments daily.