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V O L . X X X N O. V § 2 M A R C H 4 , 2 0 2 4 10 I N N OVAT I O N B rett Wickard recalls a light- bulb moment that changed his trajectory from being the owner of an entertainment retail chain to the developer of a cloud-based retail support software. Wickard, a Bowdoin College alumnus, founded Bull Moose, a Portland-based music and entertain- ment retailer that opened in 1989. (In 2022, he sold the company to employ- ees and stepped down as president and CEO, but still serves as chair.) Along the way, he was contacted by Universal Music, a large music dis- tributor and source of Bull Moose products. Universal had been ana- lyzing their customer data and found that Bull Moose's inventory cover- age was much stronger and returns were far lower than other retailers. "ey said, 'Whatever your secret is, could you sell it to the rest of our customers?'" Wickard says. "And we did have a secret. It was having our operations talk to each other in real time." But innovative ideas don't exist sui generis. at light-bulb moment was grounded in previous insights that had unfolded through the Bull Moose experience. e idea for inte- grated retail operations came through something simple — getting to know the customers. " We were having the conver- sations: 'Why do people choose to come in? Why does somebody buy something?'" says Wickard. "If we could find a way to capture that infor- mation, we could get ahead of other retailers." Predictive data Early on, Wickard and his team realized there were certain people who, when they bought something, everyone else was buying it a few days later. He noticed one customer in particular. "Jack would buy something and then everyone would buy it. So we started thinking about how we could use that information to be more predictive." To get that predictive data, they started a frequent buyer program and measured what people were buying. "e secret was that we were also getting products sold back to us for resale," he says. "at mattered, too, Born of retail A software company that 'eats, sleeps and breathes retail' B y L a u r i e S c h r e i b e r P H O T O / T I M G R E E N WAY Brett Wickard founded FieldStack to deliver cloud-based retail support software that was based on insights he gained as the founder and long- time owner of entertainment retail chain Bull Moose. F O C U S FieldStack www.fieldstack.com / South Portland Founded: 2013 Founder and CEO: Brett Wickard What it does: Develops cloud-based suite of lean retail applications Workforce: 35 Funding: Self-financed

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