The Long Tail of Retail: Startup Aims to Help Businesses Turn Data Into Dollars

Will Fuentes and Cary Scott want to help businesses out-Amazon Amazon.com.

The two co-founders of the Arlington-based tech startup Lemur Retail, who are serving as the inaugural entrepreneurs-in-residence at Arlington Economic Development, have developed software to help salespeople move products and companies maximize the return on the products they stock.

Inspired by the idea of the "long tail of retail" — the line on a graph of product versus sales that extends indefinitely — Fuentes originally wanted to call the company Salamander. Scott told him people like lemurs better.

"Really, it was about being able to capture the last little pieces of your inventory," Fuentes recently told Patch in his office space at Arlington Economic Development. He's at the Ballston location for phone or in-person appointments from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Mondays; Scott is available from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Fridays.

[Q&A: Lemur CEO Talks About Life as an Entrepreneur in Arlington]

It's been a long journey for Fuentes, a one-time lawyer who gave up practicing at a high-profile Washington firm to take a $9-an-hour job at Best Buy about a decade ago. He'd wanted an employee discount and decided to work a few holiday shifts to get one. It wasn't long before he quit practicing law and went into retail full-time. He said he became a manager six weeks later.

During that time, Fuentes started tracking customer information — not information on people who bought things, which stores already are able to track, but rather, on people who didn't buy things.

"I was doing it on a piece of paper," Fuentes said. "At the time, all it was was me asking customers, 'What would you pay, and how can I get back in touch with you?' I wasn't doing anything extraordinary. I was just managing to take all that information and make it relevant."

The idea is simple. Rather than let high-dollar items sit on a shelf for months and then slash prices simply to move them out of a store, Fuentes kept track of the price points customers were willing to pay. If a dozen people were willing to come back and buy a $1,000 television if it was discount just 10 percent, that's important to know before cutting prices in half just to clear floor space, he thought.

Fuentes tested the idea at a few other retailers and, after teaming up with Scott, a family friend, what's now Lemur Retail was born in late 2011 — eight years after he entered the world of retail.

"We bring the best of what's online into a retail location," Fuentes said. "So our tool is still an intelligence gathering tool, but now it's more responsive to the intelligence being gathered."

Like all startups, the company has its eye on profitability. Fuentes said Lemur's goal was to have one large national account by the end of the year. The company already has tested their software with a couple of larger accounts and are in discussions with them, he said.

Arlington Economic Development spokeswoman Cara O'Donnell told Patch in an email that Fuentes and Scott were chosen as the initial entrepreneurs in residence because of their perspective and knowledge of best practices, particularly in the area of pitching ideas to venture capitalists and using social media to market a business.

"They’ve lived exactly what our new startups and entrepreneurs are experiencing now, and they’re part of this tight-knit startup community," O'Donnell said.

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