NIKE ACQUIRES RETAIL ANALYTICS COMPANY CELECT

Nike has acquired Celect, a leading retail predictive analytics and demand sensing firm based in Boston. Celect is Nike’s latest acquisition fueling its “Consumer Direct Offense” strategy, serving consumers personally at a global scale.

Founded in 2013, Celect holds a cutting-edge intellectual property portfolio across data science and software engineering. Its cloud-based analytics platform provides proprietary insights that allow retailers to optimize inventory across an omnichannel environment through hyper-local demand predictions.

Celect’s team will immediately be integrated into Nike’s global operations team and its co-founders will continue as tenured professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, consulting Nike on an ongoing basis.

“With the acquisition of Celect, Nike greatly accelerates our digital advantage by adding a platform developed by world-class data scientists,” said Eric Sprunk, chief operating officer at Nike. “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.”

“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,” added John Andrews, CEO of Celect.