How to Identify White Space Opportunities

Whether you are in Design, Merchandising, or Marketing - analyzing products within the market currently can help you identify opportunities for your business. 

Identify Gaps in your Competitors Assortment

Using MarketPulse alongside TrendPulse helps you identify opportunities by showing where trends are gaining traction and how strongly they are represented across the market. This helps you spot where competitors may have limited assortment, where certain ideas may be underrepresented, and where your brand may have room to stand out.

Workflow Example: Start in TrendPulse to identify current trends already present in your assortment or trends you can act on quickly. Then, use MarketPulse to see whether competitors carry those same ideas. By comparing trend momentum with market availability, you can make more informed decisions about product focus, messaging, and opportunities for differentiation. It also creates a strong opportunity to highlight across email, site pages, and social media that you offer products aligned with current trends—especially when competitors either do not carry them or offer only a limited assortment.

If you’re able to move quickly on a trend, you can also use MarketPulse to assess whether competitors are already capturing it and examine how those products are showing up in the market. This can help you better differentiate your offering from competing products.

Identify Successful Products in an Aspirational Brand’s Assortment

Identify which products within a brand’s assortment are stocking out by using the Top Market Mover filter in Market Stream. This helps surface potential best-sellers and uncover product themes you may want to develop into. For example, you might notice repeated details such as asymmetrical necklines across tops and dresses or distressed denim across shorts, pants, and jackets.

Top Market Mover = Indicates potential best-sellers in the market based on the percentage of a product that is sold out across style, color, and size.

Workflow Example:

Identify New Brands Through the Market

After selecting a category in MarketPulse, use the Retail Site filter to choose a multi-brand retailer, such as Revolve. Then, open the Cross Section Report to explore new brands by category. Set the Y-axis to Brands, the X-axis to Category, and the dropdown to Product Count. From there, sort a category column, such as Tops, from highest to lowest to identify which brands have the largest assortment in that category. This can help surface new or emerging brands a retailer may be testing that you may not yet be tracking.

Because the report functions similarly to a pivot table, exporting it to Excel can make it easier to further analyze and manipulate the data.

Workflow Example:

TL TIP:  Save these filter selections to make it easier to monitor the progress of this Cross Section report over time, such as tracking a brand’s performance across retailers. Use the Brands filter at the top of the page to select the new brands identified in the Cross Section report, then save that view as a filter so you can monitor Stockout % and any newly added products over time.