What it is
Every company that plans a season with Tightly sits on one side of a table. A brand makes or sources products and sells them to shoppers and to accounts. A company in the retailer chair buys from brands and sells to shoppers through its own stores and online. Both plan on the same product and the same calendar. What differs is who the counterparty is and where the stock sits, so the words swap. The chair is which side you sit on. Setup asks it with three rows, one per chair, each a name and a sentence:
Brand
We make or source products and sell them to shoppers and to retail accounts.
Retailer
We buy from brands and sell to shoppers through stores and online.
Both
We sell our own products through our own stores and to accounts.
How Tightly decides it
Setup's first question asks what kind of company this is, with no plan named. Settings and General shows it beside the vertical as Kind of company, Brand, Retailer or Both, and any seat with write access can change it; the rail re-words on the next frame. A company with no recorded chair reads as a brand, because every organisation predates the question and every one was onboarded as a brand. The chair is stated, never inferred from your channels or your locations.
The chair never sells a room. What you can open is your plan's; the chair chooses the words, adds or removes a few rail rows, and, when it is recorded, fills in a few settings nobody has answered yet: the names of your product levels, the scope a new commitment opens with, the grain Demand forecasting opens at, which way Tightly Connect points, and the kind a new location is created as. A setting you have already answered is never overwritten. A company in the retailer chair, on any plan, reads its rail in that chair's words. Both is the brand's words plus the store words, never a third vocabulary: a brand that owns stores gains Location as the covering word for its warehouses and stores, and the store, online, drop-ship and franchise channel types, and keeps everything else.
The words on the face
| Object | Brand chair | Retailer chair | Both |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who we buy from | Supplier | Vendor | Supplier |
| Where stock sits | Warehouse | Store; the settings page is Stores & DCs | Location |
| What comes in | Delivery | Receipt | Delivery |
| What the counterparty sold | Sell-out | Sales (your own tills) | Sell-out |
| The weekly file | Sell-out intake | Share sales | Sell-out intake |
| Moving stock between places | Transfer orders | Store transfers | Transfer orders |
| Deciding where the buy lands | Allocation | Allocation to stores | Allocation |
| Price cuts | Markdown candidates | Markdowns | Markdown candidates |
| The counterparty's book | Account book | Vendor book | Account book |
| The counterparty's plan | Account plan | Vendor plan | Account plan |
| A style graded for a counterparty | Account baseline | Vendor grade | Account baseline |
| The room where two sides meet | Tightly Connect | Tightly Connect | Tightly Connect |
| Money claimed back | Claims | Chargebacks | Claims |
| How the counterparty performed | Supplier scorecard | Vendor scorecard | Supplier scorecard |
| Channel types | Direct, Wholesale, Account channel | Stores, Online, Drop-ship, Franchise; the brand's three codes read Direct, Franchise, Franchise | The brand's plus the store's |
The brand's middle channel word is quoted as the face prints it; the room those legs are read in is Tightly Connect.
Words that do not move: Home, Ask Tightly, Inbox, Skills, Commitments, Selling periods, Bench, Demand forecasting, Demand signals, Events, Sales performance, Open to buy, Cash & payments, Investment review, Catalogue, Families, Analogs, Stock on hand, Stocktakes, Settings.
The retailer chair adds its own rows: Receipts and Vendor scorecard in the buy book, and Markdowns in Finance where the plan draws Finance. A retailer that owns no brands of its own has no Manufacturing orders row. The brand's Tightly Connect rows leave the retailer's rail, and an address on that side answers:
The brand's side, and yours is the buyer portal.
Apart from the chair's own name in Setup and in Settings, the word retailer stays off every face in both chairs: in the brand chair the customer's customer is an account; in the retailer chair the reader is never named, because a product does not tell its reader what it thinks she is.
What you can do about it
Answer the Setup question as the company is; choose Both rather than a lie when it genuinely is both. Change the chair in Settings and General when the company changes; nothing is deleted, and the words follow on the next frame. Ask Tightly's suggested questions follow your chair, its help search reads the articles for your chair, and the help centre carries a chair switch for the same reason.
Glossary line
The chair is which side of the table a company sits on, the brand chair, the retailer chair or both; it chooses the words on every face and never what the plan includes.