A shrink number that the finance team couldn't reconcile.
Brighton Grocer is a 14-store independent chain operating across regional Victoria. Like every grocer, they had a shrink problem. Unlike most, they had no shared definition of what shrink actually was.
Each store manager was running their own monthly audit, using their own categories, on their own schedule. The Group accountant was getting one number; loss prevention was getting another; the categories team was working off a third. By the time finance had reconciled them - six weeks late - the trail was cold.
"We knew shrink was costing us something north of 1.5% of revenue," recalls Sara Whitman, Group Operations Manager. "But we couldn't tell you whether it was the deli, the back dock, the front-of-house or all three. Every audit took two people three days, and the answer was always 'inconclusive - try again next month.'"
We had three different shrink numbers, depending on who you asked, and none of them were actionable. Sara Whitman · Group Operations Manager, Brighton Grocer
Daily shelf truth, staged audits, one shared number.
Working with the tapestry success team, Brighton Grocer rolled out Retail+ across all 14 stores in two weeks. The team didn't try to do everything at once. Instead, they staged the rollout into three focused passes:
- Week 1 - single source of truth. Every store on the same daily shrink definition, narrated by Hank in plain English.
- Weeks 2–4 - daypart audits. Targeted physical audits, scheduled by Hank against the categories and dayparts showing the largest negative variance.
- Weeks 4–12 - closed-loop. Every audit outcome fed back into the model so Hank could narrow the search faster the next time.
"The biggest change wasn't technical," Whitman says. "It was that every Monday morning, all 14 store managers were now looking at the same shrink number, broken out the same way, with the same recommendations on what to audit that week."
38% in 90 days. And - finally - a number everyone trusts.
The headline outcome was a 38% reduction in shrink over the first 90 days. But the team is quick to point out that the more important change was qualitative.
We've stopped arguing about whether the shrink number is right and started arguing about what to do about it. That's the change I was hoping for and couldn't articulate. Sara Whitman · Group Operations Manager, Brighton Grocer
What's next.
With shrink under control, Brighton Grocer has turned the same approach onto basket-attach and reset-compliance - the two next-largest unanswered questions for the chain. The team is also a design partner on tapestry Tasks, the new cross-org collaboration workflow that lets Brighton's category buyers raise live tasks directly to their supplier counterparts.
"We've gone from spending half our energy on 'is this number right?' to spending all of it on 'what do we do about this?'," Whitman says. "That's the whole game."