Jon Stojan
Our gut is helpful for many things; for example, it can keep us out of danger. But using it as your data source for making sound business decisions isn’t a good idea. Fortunately, with Grip Places, you don’t have to.
Grip Places empowers retail and hospitality operators by enabling them to leverage onsite real-time customer data through advanced AI & video analytics. This allows business operators to analyze customer behavior and historical trends and gain detailed insights into customer demographics.
Utilizing their proprietary AI & ML software, the Grip Places platform offers businesses a comprehensive overview of their customers—demographics, the percentage of men/women who visit, new versus repeat customers, and more. These insights help operators optimize marketing strategies and daily operations, fostering increased sales and customer loyalty in today’s unpredictable business landscape.
Founders Jon Fairband, Jed Levin, Anthony Hildoer, and Kyle Schommer give us a 360 view of Grip Places’ unique approach, market positioning and the transformative impact of their solution.
The product
Fairband highlights, “Our primary focus is delivering real-time onsite Video Analytics as a Service (VAaaS). Leveraging the existing camera infrastructure of a location, we can provide insights into foot traffic, utilizing our re-ID technology to prevent double-counting individuals. Our capabilities encompass gender analysis, offering valuable information on the demographic trends specific to each location, average age and age ranges and more. In the past, operators often depended on generalized datasets like Zip Codes or Credit Card transactions, resulting in an incomplete understanding of their actual customer base.”
“We are the Google Analytics of physical spaces,” Hildoer explains. “We offer businesses valuable data for marketing validation and business intelligence.”
A 24/7 viewpoint
The Grip Places team envisions providing restaurateurs and retail operators with a continuous, 24/7 perspective. Levin explains, “It’s like a 24/7 virtual General Manager (GM). Today, operators need managers present in the restaurant, sensing its pulse for 16 hours a day, seven days a week. They would be able to report to owners and say, “Oh, we’re missing out on ladies’ night, and we should do a ladies’ night on Wednesday or at lunchtime, or we aren’t getting businesspeople in; how can we do that?”
“It’s impossible to ask a person to work 16 hours a day, seven days a week, so the only way to reproduce that is through vision, with cameras, with data. There are other ways of getting analytics in retail or restaurant locations. There’s sales data. These foot counter things that use ultrasonic sensors in the ceiling will count how many bodies are in the room. But the only thing that gives you the truth is camera analytics.”
Even if every restaurant had a human on the floor 24/7, generating ideas on improving the restaurant, including increased sales, loyalty, and customer acquisition, those ideas are often just that. With Grip Places, business operators can get the proof they need for effective decision-making. Levin adds, “Grip Places delivers complex data, hard science, and real actionable insights.“
The Dashboard
Grip Places’ dashboard tackles the general lack of data or actionable insights for retail and restaurant operators to drive growth. Head of Sales, Schommer, elucidates, “This industry heavily relies on gut feelings and instincts, and our product is designed to replicate that gut feeling, providing business owners with data that validates their gut instincts or gives them the aha moment with new impactful insights.”
Running on existing camera infrastructure through an edge device, Grip Places’ software provides real-time and comprehensive insights. Levin highlights, “The dashboard offers insights into customer volume, actual headcounts, gender ratios, total visits by gender, popular days of the week, and more.” Here’s a snapshot of some of the dashboards:
Additionally, Grip Places’ video analytics can track the percentage of repeat versus new customers, a critical metric in sustaining a customer base in the retail and restaurant industry. Levin remarks, “Historically, maintaining a 70% to 80% repeat business is crucial in the restaurant world, built on residual customers. Last week, we observed that 83% were repeat customers.”
The founders note, “None of this is tracking identities, the actual human beings themselves. Everything we do at Grip is anonymized, so all personal information is always protected. We don’t store any image or video of a person’s likeness. Fairband emphasizes, “We place the utmost importance on privacy. All our technology is anonymized within our algorithms to ensure GDPR and CCPA compliance.”
Targeting other industries
Grip Places’ application extends beyond the confines of the restaurant or retail sectors, catering to businesses of all diverse sizes, from small enterprises to large corporations.
Schommer explains, “Aside from retail and hospitality, and as an example, the Grip platform could be used by a commercial real estate group that would want to enable their buildings to be “Smart Buildings” giving them the ability raise or decrease rents based upon foot traffic, market to the right tenant and be able to sell the location-based data back to their tents that leased the space.”
Today, the team strategically focuses on the retail and hospitality sector, aiming to provide insights crucial for expansion, rebranding, and strategic decision-making.
Exciting things are happening in data analytics for business owners, and Grip Places is at the top of the list with its video analytics. It offers a unique and powerful tool to understand and optimize owners’ physical spaces rather than just using their gut. With a focus on complex data, science-backed insights, and a commitment to privacy, Grip is unleashing a genuinely innovative video analytics platform that every business needs and will want to make decision-making strategic rather than relying on one’s gut.
Check out Grip Places today.