Go into any Walmart, Target, Kroger, 7-Eleven or CVS store, and notice the way the items are displayed on the shelves. There may be shirts next to socks, Lucky Charms beside Froot Loops or cough medicines by pain relievers.
Bottles of Dr Pepper may sit in the racks next to Coke, Pepsi and Mountain Dew.
It may seem the products were placed randomly in the aisles.
They were not. Instead, a Bentonville company has studied shelf-placement strategies and developed a computer program that helps companies decide the best ways to display their wares.
Nuqleous, which has been named one of the fastest growing companies by Inc. for the past three years, represents 3,700 brands in 700 categories. Its clients earn nearly $41 billion in annualized sales.
Owner Paul Sims has created Shelf IQ, a program that uses sales records and demographics to make a “planogram” that helps stores decide the best places to put items.
“We look at how much space should be devoted to different brands of cereal, for example,” Sims said “We then decide what to do with the space available for cereals. Our software helps us determine how much space to allocate to brands and whether brands like Great Value should sit next to them. People don’t realize it, but thousands of hours go into the layout of store aisles.”
Nuqleous began as a boutique consulting firm called Rock Solid Retail in 2013 and worked primarily with Walmart. In 2015, Sims said, he shifted the company’s focus from consulting to software developing.
Sims, like his company, also underwent a drastic career shift once.
He first wanted to be a music teacher and earned his degree in music education at the University of Oklahoma. Sims began teaching music on the junior high school level at Fayetteville but soon learned he did not like it.
A self-proclaimed “introvert,” Sims was more interested in computer programming in the mid-1990s, after seeing how computers were used in the school classrooms as a driven learning process.
Despite the change, Sims said there are similarities between music and computer coding.
“Both are creative activities that have structured laws,” he said.
Sims earned a master’s degree in education technology at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville and became the software developer for Bentonville schools. He was soon recruited to lead the technology division at the Clarke County School District in Athens, Ga.
There, he said, he felt imposter syndrome.
“I was 30 years old, leading a 25-member team, managing an $8 million taxpayer-funded technology budget and overseeing the technological infrastructure utilized to educate 12,000 students,” Sims said. “The weight of this responsibility was immense.”
Missing northwest Arkansas, he and his wife moved back to the state and began working for a retail analytics software company.
Sims later joined Paul Springmann at Springmann’s new business, Rock Solid Retail. Sims became CEO of the company in 2020, and then, after doing a study of his own business’ goals, changed the name to Nuqleous.
“We had a big vision,” Sims said. “We wanted to get beyond the Walmart ecosystem. We wanted to be a stronger brand.”
He hired a South Carolina firm to do a branding evaluation of his company in 2020. With the firm’s input, he decided on the name “Nuqleous” for several reasons. In chemistry, the nucleus holds an atom together. All energy comes from the nucleus, Sims said. The “Q” in the name refers to the Shelf IQ program he designed.
The name change was initiated in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic was rampant across the country. The virus changed shopping habits, and Sims had to adjust.
“Shopping changed then,” he said. “We were dealing with two types of shoppers — consumers and direct grocery shoppers, those people in the store who do the shopping for curbside pickups. We had to develop programs for efficiency.”
The company grew fast and now employs 53 people.
In July, Nuqleous took a step further by securing a $26 million investment from Blue Ladder Capital, a Los-Angeles-based venture capital firm. Two of its representatives, Garrett Levey and Bill Kloza, became co-presidents of Nuqleous.
Sims said he wants his company to focus on increasing the speed of responding to retail needs at stores.
“The [Blue Ladder Capital] investment was a huge milestone for us as a company,” he said. “It will help us continue to grow and keep helping the retail industry face its numerous challenges.”
