Stonehenge Technology Labs, creator of the STOPWATCH unified commerce software, is rapidly changing how consumer goods (CG) companies understand and react to their customer’s journey. At the last Northwest Arkansas Tech Summit, the company’s CEO, Meagan Bowman, was named “Innovator of the Year” in emerging tech trends. Founded in 2019, Bowman and a team of world-class engineers built STOPWATCH after seeing the need for CG companies to close the gap between online and brick-and-mortar buying signals.

Northwest Arkansas, home to over 1200 consumer goods nexus offices in addition to major logistics player Walmart, has an outsized impact on the entire global industry and is known as one of the most noteworthy places in the world for CG and retail innovation.

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STOPWATCH exists in the complicated intersection of consumer and data science. Many of the largest companies still rely on legacy ERP systems to track and manage goods, but more is needed to extend that visibility throughout the entire ecommerce ecosystem.

Stonehenge received $2 million in seed funding in August 2021, from a group led by Irish Angels, with participation from Bread and Butter Ventures, Gaingels, Angeles Investors, Bonfire Ventures, and Red Tail Venture Capital. While Bowman did have an opportunity to launch the company in Silicon Valley, she and her investors recognized that the smart money in this industry resides in Northwest Arkansas. In the space of one year, STOPWATCH has doubled its revenue and has inked multi-year technology contracts with the world’s top Fortune 100 consumer goods companies.

CG companies have begun to look towards digitizing their analytics, but according to McKinsey, many don’t measure up relative to other industries. Even those “ahead of the curve” have not successfully connected their daily digital insights and deep analytical databases so anyone within the enterprise can exercise autonomous actions impacting supply chain, digital advertising pricing, and inventory routes. STOPWATCH is a SaaS-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) “wrapper” delivering integrated and actionable results within 20 days of implementation. This allows CG companies for the first time to make full use of end-to-end retail and customer data across all retailers and distribution channels through a single pane of glass. Ingesting over 100 million rows of customized data per workspace per day, STOPWATCH normalizes the data points across all online and brick & mortar channels at the individual SKU level and throws real-time actionable alerts to cross functional business units. A STOPWATCH membership workspace averages between 50 and 500 users today. It’s quick and light design has been lauded as “one of the most impactful data products since the Bloomberg terminal.”

“STOPWATCH exists in the complicated intersection of CG and data science,” says Bowman. “Many of the largest companies still rely on legacy ERP systems to track and manage goods, but more is needed to extend that visibility throughout the entire ecommerce ecosystem. The talented engineers of Stonehenge Technology Labs and I built STOPWATCH to bring together data from that ecosystem into a single, easily accessible system allowing those companies to unlock significant revenue opportunities and profitability gaps that have, over the years, become hidden in plain sight as the customer journey has become much more integrated organically. Bowman explains, “A traditional system may be able to tell what and how many of each SKU each given retailer sold a month ago, but this approach doesn’t reveal the bigger picture around multiple consumer connection points and the propensity of that consumer to switch and substitute across hundreds of sites and brick & mortar locations. This includes direct to consumer sites as well.

Bowman is a member of the Fast Company Executive Board and Forbes Technology Council, where she contributes her insights on innovation defining the future of work. She is frequently sought out as a contributor, thought leader, speaker and podcast guest, serves on the Sam Walton College of Business Entrepreneurship Advisory Council and the Data Science Curriculum Board at University of Arkansas.

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