Startup interview: Sander Roose, Founder and CEO, Omnia Retail

RTIH: Tell us about Omnia Retail

SR: Omnia Retail is the company behind Europe's premier dynamic pricing software. We founded it in 2012, and our ultimate goal is to give retailers and brands the tools they need to take control of their pricing and stay market competitive in the era of e-commerce. 

We’re based in Amsterdam, but we have a presence across Europe including in the UK, Germany, France and we have plans to expand even further abroad. We presently have over 100 customers, including companies like Decathlon, Samsung and MediaMarkt.

My co-founder, Herman de Jager, and I built Omnia as a reaction to the realities of e-commerce. As e-commerce has grown in importance, it’s been increasingly difficult for retailers to keep their prices consistent or know what the competition is charging for a product. 

The price of a product is so important for retailers to get right - it affects consumer perception, profitability, and market positioning - so retailers and brands need to invest in digital ways to moderate and control their pricing strategy.

RTIH: What was the inspiration behind setting the company up? 

SR: Omnia’s the product of my career’s worth of work in retail strategy consulting and Herman’s career in retail software engineering. 

When we met, Herman and I were both running separate companies, but we saw an instant match in our way of thinking, and noticed a common problem for our customers: they couldn’t manage their prices as e-commerce grew. 

As prices became more competitive for every product in a retailer’s assortment — not just the ones that are highly elastic — we saw that technology was the only way for our customers to continue thriving.  

As e-commerce was growing and as companies like Amazon became more sophisticated with pricing, the market was becoming more dynamic. Our customers needed automation at scale to help keep their assortments price competitive at all times. So we created a tool that let them have full control of their prices. 

RTIH: What has been the industry reaction thus far?

SR: In the early years we were more or less too early. Every conversation was about education. We had to explain why dynamic pricing was not just another nice-to-have software, but really a necessity for the future. We had to convince people about the value of investing in automation and technology and educate them a lot on the tool.

A lot of retailers today still handle their prices manually and have teams of people who change prices, but this is changing. People are starting to recognise the value of pricing and seeing that it’s one of the most important ways you can influence your profitability. 

A recent McKinsey study found that a 1% improvement in pricing led to a 6% increase in profits. If you have thousands of products, and if the market prices change several times a day, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table by delaying investment in digitisation. Dynamic pricing is becoming more of an industry standard every single month. 

“My co-founder, Herman de Jager, and I built Omnia as a reaction to the realities of e-commerce. As e-commerce has grown in importance, it’s been increasingly difficult for retailers to keep their prices consistent or know what the competition is charging for a product”

RTIH: What has been your biggest challenge/setback?

SR: Finding the right people and recruitment has been the biggest challenge for us. Only a small amount of startups succeed, so you need a top team. We’re playing a business pro sports game, and we need an A-level team to support that. 

People need to be high performers and a value fit, and they need to have the right mentality for a scale up and be willing to go with the flow of things and move quickly. We never want to compromise on hiring just for the sake of maximising growth, so we really invest a lot of time in our recruitment to try and find the right people. 

RTIH: What are the biggest challenges facing the omnichannel retail sector right now?

SR: The coronavirus is an obvious answer to this question, and it’s completely upending retail. The pandemic has accelerated the trend toward e-commerce, and we’ve seen 10 years of growth in the e-commerce space in just a few months.

Online shopping is becoming the new normal, even in places like Latin America where there hasn’t been a tradition of e-commerce. I expect that the increased e-commerce presence is here to stay, so omnichannel retailers need to re-evaluate the role of the physical store in this new era. 

However, some other things that are keeping retail CEOs up at night are the players like Amazon and Alibaba using their cloud businesses to fund retail growth. With Amazon’s international expansion too, it is becoming a more serious player around the world. 

RTIH: What's the best question about your company or the market asked of you recently by a.) an investor and b.) a customer?

SR: From investors, the best question we get is whether our software is only for e-commerce pure players. The answer is no; Omnia is perfect for any retailer, including omnichannel companies.

We have connections and partnerships with other technology companies like an electronic shelf label vendor that make physical stores much easier to manage with dynamic pricing. 

The best question from customers or potential customers is what if everybody uses the same software? I can understand why someone may not want to use the same pricing software as their competitor, but we’ve set our system up to give each company total control over what they are doing. 

Ultimately customers are responsible for the data and the strategy that they put into Omnia, so regardless of whether we run two competitors on our platform, outcomes for each will be different. This is because inputs for the software are totally different: goals, purchase prices, commercial strategy, et cetera. 

RTIH: What can we expect to see from Omnia over the next 12 months?

SR: Our goal in the next year is to provide more data insights to our customers and the larger market. We’re a data-driven company, and we have a lot of internal knowledge about retail. 

We want to do a better job of creating great content that will provide more of our industry knowledge and highlight trends in our datasets. We’ve done a great job so far, but there is still a lot of room to grow. 

So in the next 12 months keep your eyes on us for some interesting content. We already have some interesting insights prepped for Black Friday.