Case Study: Guitar Center achieves optimized site selection and reduced occupancy costs with Tango

Guitar Center - Customer Case Study

Guitar Center, the world’s largest musical instrument retailer with over 260 U.S. stores, faced the challenge of managing steady but modest growth (eight to ten new locations per year) while ensuring adequate market coverage and identifying opportunity gaps in existing markets. To support that expansion strategy, Guitar Center engaged Tango to provide market optimization and sales forecasting services.

Tango developed robust market optimization and sales-forecasting models that assessed overall sales, net-new sales and cannibalization from proposed sites, and performed a departmental “bottom-up” analysis to forecast sales across four key departments. Tango’s work revealed that Guitar Center’s status as a destination retailer allowed it to select less expensive sites without hurting performance, producing measurable savings on occupancy costs, while the department-level forecasts enabled targeted merchandising and store layouts (e.g., allocating more Live DJ space in young, urban trade areas) to better align each store to its market.

Guitar Center