About Riparian
The riverbank is where you can read the current.
Riparian exists for suppliers who are too important to run on gut feel and too lean to build an analytics department. We stand at the edge of your business, close enough to see the flow of sales, stock and retailer decisions, and tell you what it means and what to do.
Why a specialist
You work directly with the person doing the analysis, and that person already knows your world.
A general analytics firm has to learn what a line review is, why a fill-rate penalty hurts twice, and that a dashboard nobody opens is a cost. We start past that. Distribution, velocity, availability, promotion mechanics, assortment and account planning are the working vocabulary, so the first conversation is about your business rather than about ours.
Boutique means tailored, not small-scale. Every engagement is scoped to your retailers, your data and your team's capacity, and built so the solutions keep working after we step back. You will not be handed to an account layer, and you will not be sold a platform you have to staff.
- Direct accessThe analyst who built the model is the one on the call.
- Commercial judgmentRecommendations connect to a decision, a value and a confidence level.
- Practical deliveryBuilt on tools you can own, documented so they outlast the engagement.
- Honest scopeWe say when the data cannot support an answer, and what would.
Founder
Taylor W. Tolley
Taylor's background is in business intelligence and analytics on the supplier side of retail, working with clients across multiple retailers and channels: home center and home improvement, hardware, farm and B2B, with particularly deep experience in The Home Depot, including time inside the company in financial forecasting and planning, working alongside its inventory planning and merchandising teams. Earlier in his career he worked in corporate finance and operations, which is where the habit of connecting a number to a decision was formed. Most recently he has led the analytics function for a retail consultancy providing representation and advisory services to a broad portfolio of brands, building the reporting a sales organization opens before every line review, consolidating retailer portals that were never designed to agree with one another, turning point-of-sale, category and industry data into decisions, and standing up and rolling out enterprise-wide AI initiatives that put those capabilities in the hands of sales, account and operations teams. The work has spanned categories from plumbing and irrigation, paint and cleaning to lawn and garden, outdoor power, pet, seasonal, housewares and health and beauty.
He founded Riparian to bring that discipline directly to small and midsize suppliers who need it and cannot staff it. The firm sits at the exact point where a supplier's data meets a merchant's decision, and that is the point Taylor has worked from throughout his career.
A graduate of the University of Georgia's Terry College of Business, Taylor lives in the Atlanta suburbs with his wife and two daughters, and when he is not reading retail data he is usually on a golf course, on a river with a fly rod, or being a dad, which he considers the best of the three.
Principles
Five things we hold ourselves to on every engagement.
They are the test we apply before anything reaches you.
Commercial clarity
Translate complex information into useful decisions.
Precision
Support recommendations with evidence and sound judgment.
Foresight
Identify emerging opportunities and risks before they are obvious.
Practical progress
Build solutions clients can put to work this quarter.
Confident partnership
Thoughtful expertise, personal attention and commercial understanding.
Where the experience comes from
The channels, categories and data Riparian works in every week.
Riparian's method is shaped by the specific mechanics of selling through home center, hardware, farm and B2B retail, not by a generic analytics playbook.
Channels
Home center and home improvement, hardware, farm and B2B retail, across multiple retailers in each, with particular depth in The Home Depot and the two-step hardware market served through cooperatives and distributors.
Categories
Plumbing and irrigation, paint, cleaning, lawn and garden, outdoor power and recreation, pet, impulse, seasonal, health and beauty, housewares.
Data
Retailer point-of-sale and inventory portals, distributor and co-op reporting, category and industry data, and the supplier's own order and shipment records.
Tools
Tableau and the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, including dashboards delivered inside SharePoint, alongside established AI platforms. Confirm named tools and certifications.