Thin margins, thick paperwork — and a Core built for both.
One model of your trade — every SKU, order, vendor, register close, and dollar — run by a core that works inside the systems you already own. The point of sale, the storefront, the ledger: bridged, not replaced. Nothing to migrate. Nothing to re-learn.
We came to retail from construction, where inventory is called material and a stockout stops a pour. The discipline is the same; the clock is faster. Retail margin is not lost in one bad decision — it leaks through a hundred small gaps between systems that never speak. The Core exists to close them.
THE RETAIL CORE
One model of your store.
The Retail Core is an ontology — a living model of your business in which every object your trade runs on is defined once and connected to every system that touches it. Your point of sale, your storefront, your vendor invoices, your bank feed: bridged, not replaced. The AI is only the polished glass on top. The model underneath is the instrument.
SKU · PURCHASE ORDER · ORDER · VENDOR · LOCATION · CUSTOMER · RETURN · SETTLEMENT · MARGIN — DEFINED ONCE, SYNCHRONIZED EVERYWHERE
LAYER 01
Automations & agents
The work doing itself — reorders drafted, settlements tied out, questions answered — always within rules you set and sign.
LAYER 02
The Retail Core
The model of your store. Every SKU, order, vendor, and dollar as one connected body of knowledge.
LAYER 03
Stewardship
Humans and machine, in daylight. Every automated action logged, traceable, and visible to you.
REGISTER · STOREFRONT · STOCKROOM VENDOR INVOICES · INBOX ↓ THE RETAIL CORE ↓ THE BRIEF · ONE SIGNATURE THE WORK, DONE QUIETLY
THE VALUE CHAIN
Shelf to settlement, nothing in the gaps.
THE SHELF
Stock watched, reorders drafted before the gap.
THE ORDER
Order to door with exceptions surfaced early.
THE LEDGER
Reconciled, compared, current — CPA-ready.
THE VALUE CHAIN, HELD
● Inventory & Replenishment
The count is right on the day of receipt and fiction by Friday. Cycle counts get skipped in season, safety stock is a guess, and the reorder lives in the buyer's head until the shelf is empty. Meanwhile the back room holds last season's cash in boxes — dead stock aging in the dark while the best seller sells out in daylight.
In the Core, every SKU carries a live count, a true cost, a velocity, and a runway. Sales, receipts, and returns net against it hourly; the purchase order is drafted before the gap reaches the shelf, and the slow movers surface with a markdown proposal attached — while there is still a season to sell them in.
The living count
POS sales, receiving, and returns netted against every SKU, with cycle counts targeted where drift is likeliest.
Runway & reorder
Days-of-stock computed against velocity and vendor lead time; the PO drafted before the stockout, held for your signature.
Dead-stock watch
Aging inventory flagged with a markdown plan before it becomes cash you can't touch.
Open-to-buy discipline
The buying budget kept live against receipts and the season plan — not in a spreadsheet updated quarterly.
● Orders & Fulfillment
An order now arrives from the storefront, the marketplace, the counter, and the phone — and lives in four systems on its way to the door. Split shipments, backorders, failed payments, and address problems hide in tabs nobody owns, and the morning goes to “where is my order” emails instead of the exceptions that actually cost money.
In the Core, an order is one object from placement to doorstep, whichever channel it entered by. Exceptions are raised the hour they occur, status questions are answered from the record without a human opening a tab, and every return closes its loop — refund matched, restock counted.
One order stream
Storefront, marketplace, phone, and counter merged into a single queue with a single truth per order.
Exception watch
Stuck fulfillments, split shipments, backorders, and failed payments surfaced while they are still cheap.
WISMO, answered
“Where is my order” handled from the record, in your voice, without your morning.
Returns, closed loop
RMA, refund, and restock reconciled to the unit — and serial returners noticed.
● Vendors & Landed Cost
The invoice says 48, the receiving record says 44, and the purchase order said 50 — and the invoice gets paid anyway, because nobody has time for the three-way match. Freight, duty, and packaging never make it into unit cost, so the margin on the price tag is a fiction. And price increases arrive the polite way: silently, on the invoice.
The Core matches purchase order, receiving record, and invoice line by line before a dollar moves, rolls freight and duty into a landed cost per SKU, and remembers every price a vendor has ever charged you. Shorts get claimed, creep gets flagged, and margin is computed on the truth.
The three-way match
PO, receiving, and invoice reconciled line by line; the discrepancy raised before the payment, not after the audit.
Landed cost, real
Freight, duties, and fees carried into true unit cost — so margin math stops flattering the price tag.
Price-creep alarms
Silent increases caught on arrival, with the vendor's full price history behind the flag.
Vendor memory
Fill rates, lead times, shorts, and damages kept per vendor — so the next order is an informed one.
● The Counter
The Z-report, the processor settlement, and the bank deposit tell three versions of the same day, and reconciling them is the job that always slips. Processing fees hide inside net deposits, chargebacks expire unanswered because the evidence lives in five places, and sales tax accrues by jurisdiction in a spreadsheet nobody trusts.
The Core ties every register close to its settlement and its deposit — daily, to the penny, with every variance named. Fees are pulled apart and watched as a rate you actually know. When a dispute arrives, the answer assembles itself from the order record and goes out inside the window.
Close to deposit
Z-report, settlement, and bank deposit reconciled every day; the variance named, not absorbed.
The fee ledger
Processing costs decomposed and tracked as an effective rate — so the silent percentage stops being invisible.
Chargeback defense
Disputes answered from the record — order, delivery, signature — inside the deadline, every time.
Sales tax, kept
Collected, accrued by jurisdiction, and filing-ready — never a year-end archaeology project.
● Marketing & Demand
Marketing runs on the platform's numbers, not yours: revenue as the ad manager reports it, not margin as the ledger knows it. The email promotes the product that sold out Tuesday, the promo discounts the best seller that needed no help, and the content calendar dies the week the store gets busy.
In the Core, marketing reads the same model as the shelf. Campaigns are measured to contribution margin per SKU, every send is checked against stock before it goes, and the calendar is kept by the system — drafted in your voice, held for your approval.
Margin-true ROAS
Ad performance settled against landed cost and contribution margin — not the platform's flattering arithmetic.
Stock-aware campaigns
Every promotion checked against runway before it sends. The stockout is never advertised.
The calendar, kept
Email, social, and promotions drafted in the house voice and held to schedule through the busy weeks.
Promo postmortems
Every markdown and promo measured on lift net of margin given away — so discounts become a discipline.
● Books & Cashflow
Multi-channel selling makes the books a translation problem: deposits arrive net of fees, refunds, and reserves; COGS drifts from reality; the inventory on the balance sheet and the inventory in the building are two different numbers. The month closes weeks late, and the cash forecast lives in the owner's head.
The Core decomposes every payout into its parts, keeps COGS tied to landed cost and actual movement, and runs the reconciliations continuously instead of monthly. The books stay closed to yesterday, and cash — in, out, owed, and committed — sits on one forward curve you can read at breakfast.
Payout decomposition
Every processor and marketplace deposit split into sales, fees, refunds, and reserves — booked where each belongs.
COGS, current
Cost of goods tied to landed cost and real movement, not the last time someone updated the sheet.
The month, closed
Reconciliations run continuously; the close takes days, not weeks. CPA-ready, always.
Cash runway
Receipts, PO obligations, rent, and payroll on one forward curve — the next tight week visible from this one.
THE DEPLOYMENT
Working in days, not quarters.
STEP 01
The audit
Day one: we sit with your stack — point of sale, storefront, ledger, inbox — and map where the margin leaks. You keep the map either way.
STEP 02
Live data
Week one: read-only connections to the systems you already run. Nothing migrated, nothing installed on the counter, nothing interrupted in season.
STEP 03
The working system
The Core goes live on your real trade: reorders drafted, settlements tied out, exceptions raised. You watch it work before you owe it anything further.
STEP 04
The license
A monthly platform license on a published meter. Keep it because it earns its keep — or walk, and keep your data. It never left your accounts.
THE ENGAGEMENT
Three rungs. Never hourly.
We work the way the great platform firms work — one deployment, one license, one published ladder. No timesheets, no scope creep, no renegotiation disguised as a meeting.
I
The Deployment
A fixed fee. Your live data. A resident engineer builds the Core on the systems you already run — working in days, not quarters.
You see it running before you commit to keeping it.
II
The Platform License
A monthly license scoped to locations, channels, and connected systems. The meter is published and it never surprises.
The system earns its keep every month, or you stop paying for it.
III
The Expansion Ladder
New workflows, new divisions, new systems — at pre-published pricing, added when you ask. Growth is never a renegotiation.
The ladder is printed before you need it.
WHO IT IS FOR
Independent trade, every counter of it.
01
Multi-Location Retail
Two stores or twenty: one model across every location, with transfers, counts, and registers reconciled as one trade.
02
E-Commerce Brands
Storefront, marketplace, and 3PL as one order stream — payouts decomposed, ad spend settled against true margin.
03
Wholesale & Distribution
POs, landed cost, fill rates, and receivables held to the line — the three-way match run on every invoice, both directions.
04
Restaurants & Hospitality
Par levels, vendor invoices, and the nightly close under one discipline — prime cost watched daily, not discovered monthly.
05
Specialty & Boutique
Deep catalogs, thin teams. The Core carries the counting, the reordering, and the books so taste can carry the store.
06
Grocery & Convenience
High velocity, perishable margin. Shrink, spoilage, and delivery discrepancies surfaced the day they happen.
WHAT PEOPLE SAY · KEPT HONEST
No invented praise. The record instead.
We build retail operations with the same engineering discipline we bring to every sector the Core serves. This section holds three things we put our name to: the industry's own numbers, a standing offer, and our signatures.
$1.77 trillion
What inventory distortion — out-of-stocks and overstocks together — cost world retail in a single year.
Average retail shrink in FY2022 — $112.1 billion across the industry surveyed.
SOURCE · NATIONAL RETAIL FEDERATION, NATIONAL RETAIL SECURITY SURVEY, 2023
$172 billion
What retail spent on inventory improvements in one year — while the distortion persisted. The tools are not the shortage. The structure is.
SOURCE · IHL GROUP, 2025
THE RETAIL DESIGN-PARTNER PROGRAM · THREE SLOTS
We are taking three retail firms as design partners: deployment at founder's terms, a direct line to both founders, and a hand in what the Retail Core becomes. In exchange we ask for honesty — the results, whatever they are, become the record this section is built from. Taken in order of application.
“If the Core does not find you more margin than its license costs, say so — and stop paying for it.”
— CARSON LAUDERDALE · FOUNDER
“No quote appears on this page that was not said, by a real firm, about real work. That is the standard, and it is permanent.”
— JACK FREEMAN · CO-FOUNDER
STEWARDSHIP · ACCESS, NOT CUSTODY
Your data never leaves your accounts. We operate inside them.
A retail model runs close to two sensitive things: your customers and their payments. So the boundary is drawn in advance. Cardholder data stays with your processor — the Core works from settlement records and never touches a card number. Customer lists stay yours — never pooled, never compared across clients, never anyone's training data. Strumode holds access, never custody.
Card data never touches us
The Core reads settlements and payout reports, never card numbers. Your processor's PCI perimeter stays exactly where it is.
Customers are yours, not ours
Purchase histories and lists live in your systems, serve only your store, and are never pooled across clients.
The full ledger
Every automated read and write is logged and visible to you. The system works in daylight.
On paper
Data processing agreements in every contract. Insurance carried. Exits honored — it is your data, always.
FIRST LIGHT
The reorder was written before the stockout.
By the time the doors open, counts are current, the truck is scheduled, and the one exception that matters is flagged in gold.
THE CHAIN
Shelf to settlement, nothing in the gaps.
Inventory, orders, vendors, and books watched as one model — the gap never reaches the shelf.
THE COUNT
Current by morning. Every morning.
The ledger closes to yesterday while the store sleeps — CPA-ready without a season of catch-up.
THE HORIZON
The store that tends itself.
Commerce is becoming a conversation between systems — shelves that know their own runway, orders that negotiate their own logistics, agents buying from agents. The stores that thrive in that market will be the ones whose model of themselves is already true. We are building those models now, one counter at a time.
FOUR QUESTIONS
Asked often, answered plainly.
Do we have to replace our point of sale or our platform?
No — that is the point. The Core connects to the systems you already run and reconciles between them. The stack you chose stays; the gaps between its pieces are what we close. If you ever leave, your systems are exactly where you left them.
Where does our data live — and our customers' data?
In your accounts, where it lives now. Strumode holds access, never custody: card data stays with your processor, customer lists stay in your systems, and every automated action is logged where you can read it. Nothing is pooled across clients and nothing becomes training data.
What does this cost? Is it hourly?
Never hourly. One fixed-fee deployment, then a monthly platform license on a published meter scoped to locations, channels, and connected systems. Expansion pricing is printed before you need it. If the license does not pay for itself in found margin, stop paying it.
How fast is deployment — and can it land before peak season?
Days, not quarters. Connections are read-only first, nothing is installed on the counter, and nothing interrupts trading. The safest week to deploy is the slow one before your busy one — the Core does its learning while the store is calm and earns its keep when the rush arrives.
Bring us one buyer's Monday, one register close, or one month of payouts. We will show you what it looks like when it reconciles itself.
STRUMODE FOR CONSTRUCTIONThe job, from bid to closeout.↳ Explore
STRUMODE INTELLIGENCEThe whole record, briefed by dawn.↳ Explore
