As the success of Gerson Lerman Group mirrors the buy side’s demand for primary research, Dana Telsey and Co. announced earlier this month a formal launch of its national retail channel checking effort.
Interesting move, though not surprising, and puts them right in direct competition with firms like the Retail Intelligence Group, Cleveland Research, Verbatim Advisory Group and Farmhouse Equity Research (always think of Phish when I see this one).
According to the press release put out by Telsey Advisory Group:
The TAG channel checking team has been working on this effort since last year to establish year-over-year comparisons in order to measure each retailer. The team is led by Tom Chin, managing director of consulting and analytics, and visits 14 malls and more than 300 stores every month in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco. The TAG team grades retailers based on customer
traffic, merchandising trends, promotional activity and inventory levels.
I like to see what TAG is doing for a variety of reasons:
- I covered retail at a hedge fund and always enjoyed Telsey’s work at Bear Stearns. She’s doing great work in retail and it’s great to see what she’s doing post-BS.
- Telsey is a great case study in the Wall-Street-analyst-leaves-bank-and-starts-independent-research-firm. She’s ramping up staffing and rounding out product/service offerings. Her success augers a lot in terms of what the next generation of vertical equity research firm looks like.
