Capacity Planner is a conceptual design tool built for merchandising workflows. It seeks to help with site feasibility studies, macro planning, and everything in between. Starting with a building shell, users are able to generate a floor plan with department capacity and merchandise categories as the main focus.
Today, we’re excited to introduce Ephany Framework, an open-source platform for managing assets, their metadata, and their relationships to projects. This is the backbone of the entire Ephany ecosystem: the data structure, the REST API, and the relational logic that ties it all together.
Cost Overruns Budget overruns are a pervasive issue in construction, and retail store projects are no exception. Changes, delays, and misestimates during construction all compound…
Artificial intelligence might seem like magic, but even magic needs rules. One of the biggest misconceptions about AI is that it always gets things right.…
Despite the rise of e-commerce, physical retail in the U.S. is proving far more resilient than many expected — especially in the big-box and grocery sectors. Over the past three years, retailers like Walmart, Target, Costco, and Aldi have not only maintained but strategically expanded their physical footprints. While 2022 and 2023 saw more store openings than closures, 2024 brought a wave of store closings driven mostly by bankruptcies and weak specialty chains — not the major players in grocery or big-box retail.
Building out physical retail stores is a high-stakes game—one where a single misstep can cost thousands (or even millions). Have you ever had a store…
McDonaldization describes how industries optimize for efficiency, predictability, uniformity, and control. This principle doesn’t just apply to burgers, it’s the secret sauce behind how companies like Walmart, Dollar General, and Wegmans scale their physical stores to thousands of locations worldwide.
Imagine navigating a world where identification numbers didn’t exist. Without bank account numbers, driver’s license numbers, and social security numbers, it would be nearly impossible to look up information about a specific person with 100% certainty that you’re not mixing up people with the same name. Shouldn’t every piece of furniture, fixture, and equipment (FF&E) in your commercial space require the same standard?
Managing furniture, fixtures, and equipment (FF&E) across a fleet of stores is a complex challenge for physical retail organizations. Surprisingly, some of the largest retail brands in the world are managing those assets in Excel spreadsheets (or other similar format). If that statement resonated with you, the below image probably looks all too familiar.
We recently teamed up with a Texas construction company to design a storage unit facility. While this isn’t a exactly a bragging-worthy Revit project, we…