At this year’s PI Apparel, invent.ai Founder & CEO Gurhan Kok joined Tailored Brands CEO, President at the time, John Tighe on stage to reveal how their successful retail partnership has reimagined merchandising—and what other retailers can learn from their journey.

Over the past three years, Tailored Brands and invent.ai have worked closely to transform merchandise planning from manual, rigid processes into a dynamic system focused on financial outcomes. This mutually beneficial retail partnership has reshaped operations across both rentaland retail—enhancing inventory allocation, replenishment strategies and ultimately the customer experience across stores.

This isn’t a traditional system implementation story. It’s a real-world example of how brand partnering can rapidly transform decision-making and drive value—for both the business and its loyal customer base.

Replacing guesswork with precision

Tailored Brands operates one of North America’s largest rental businesses, accounting for roughly 50% of the US market. Before invent.ai, rental planning was entirely manual.

“We used to joke that it was caveman buying,” said John Tighe during the 2025 Merchandise Planning USA event hosted by PI Apparel. “It was all done on graph paper and spreadsheets. The team guessed by size and color what would be damaged, then wrote an order for a year out.”

This outdated process led to frequent substitutions, costly reorders and last-minute shipments—affecting both revenue and the shopping experience. Invent.ai developed a rental planning system leveraging five years of historical data to predict size-level demand, attrition and optimal allocation by location.

In just two years, Tailored Brands reduced rental receipts by $30 million, cut substitutions by more than a third and significantly improved customer satisfaction—a powerful example of how retail partnerships can deliver measurable outcomes.

“We didn’t just buy software,” said Tighe. “They built something for us. They stayed involved. I’d never seen that level of engagement before.”

Modernizing retail replenishment and inventory allocation

Beyond its rental business, Tailored Brands manages retail operations for brands like Men’s Wearhouse and Jos. A. Bank, covering thousands of stores and millions of SKUs. Their previous planning systems were rigid and relied on simple assumptions that often led to too much inventory in some places and shortages in others, causing missed sales and higher costs. To improve this, invent.ai introduced a forecasting and inventory management system that adjusts to changing demand patterns and gives a clear picture of stock levels across stores and distribution centers. This allows Tailored Brands to direct inventory to target stores where it's most likely to sell, reduce excess stock and improve product availability without raising overall inventory levels.

Since implementation in late 2024, invent.ai has helped Tailored Brands boost service levels to over 90%, which means fewer stockouts and better forecasting. The increased visibility into incoming shipments also helps avoid expensive emergency orders from distant warehouses, cutting transportation costs significantly. The company has already trimmed over $12 million of slow-moving inventory and expects to reduce more. At the same time, product availability has improved by roughly 4%, showing that better inventory placement leads to both leaner stock and better customer service. All of this strengthens the brick-and-mortar experience while reinforcing brand awareness across retail channels.

Rethinking the blueprint for retail

Tailored Brands’ journey highlights that true transformation in merchandise planning goes beyond technology, it’s about changing the way decisions are made. Through a collaborative and strategic retail partnership with invent.ai, the company moved from manual guesswork to data-driven strategies centered on financial outcomes and a more responsive supply chain. 

This shift has made Tailored Brands more agile, efficient and confident in how it manages inventory, improving the shopping experience for its loyal customer base and supporting better alignment between planning and performance. Their success offers a clear, real-world path forward for other retailers navigating operational complexity. 

Ultimately, Tailored Brands shows that with the right mindset, tools and mutually beneficial retail partnerships, meaningful change is not only possible, it can happen quickly and deliver real, lasting results.