ZaneRay and Horny Toad were recognized in an article in thestreet.com for our innovative new buyer's tool box.

Manage Your Inventory in Real Time

By Jonathan Blum
Special to TheStreet.com

SALT LAKE CITY -- Leave it to the innovative maniacs in the world of outdoor retailing to come up with a business tool that lets small retail store owners and buyers get organized and save time.

Horny Toad Activewear, a Santa Barbara, Calif.-based adventure apparel maker, is giving small retailers a glimpse into the merchandizing future with a nifty new Web-based inventory management system that can help keep inventory organized, inbound purchases on track and shop owners' sanity intact.

The system, which works only for Horny Toad clients as of now, has generated some serious buzz here at the Outdoor Retailer Winter Market, the biannual trade show for the upscale outdoor retail, adventure-travel and health industry.

This little Web gadget, called the Buyer's Tool Box, has potential to help all the people who have run retail shops, made buying trips and then lost their minds trying to keep straight what they wanted to buy from the mountain of catalogs, workbooks and samples they picked up.

"A buyer's life is hard," says Gordon Seaberry, president of Horny Toad, which has 54 employees. "So we developed the tool so they could get out of the shop more and enjoy the outdoors."

The tool box, which is deceptively simple to use, was developed in conjunction with the ZaneRay Group, a 14-person Web development and software firm out of Whitefish, Mont. Essentially, it is a Web browser that launches from a special section in the Horny Toad Web site. There, the company's entire line of apparel and other outdoor goodies is available as a series of hip, small, graphical icons. Buyers can drag and drop icons of the pieces they want to buy into a workspace on the page, creating a real-time record of their purchases.

Buyers can preview what will be shipped from the vendor, test out other accessories and -- most importantly -- see what they have spent. Horny Toad built the program around the old-school practice of cutting product photos out of the catalog and putting them up on large whiteboards where buyers and reps then pushed them around like some wild set of fashion-oriented fridge magnets.

"Though the clothes icons look and feel like simple Web graphics, they are actually tied directly into both the retailer and vendor's data base," says Henry Roberts, a vice president at ZaneRay. "That way all the attendant info about the merchandise, pricing availability, whatever, can be pushed out in real time."

Automated vendor products like this are nothing new to retailing. Big-box stores like Wal-Mart (WMT - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr - Rating), Target (TGT - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr - Rating), Best Buy (BBY - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr - Rating) and others pioneered sophisticated inventory management and buying tools that streamline their operations down to the penny. You know those ridiculous $1.83 prices at Wal-Mart? These are the programs that allow for that sort of thing.

The news here is that a relatively small business can create a similarly powerful database-management tool that can work with slick graphics.

"There was a time that we would have had to spend $100,000 on just the database component alone," says Reed Gregarson, president at ZaneRay. "Now a smaller firm like us can develop the product for specific business and make it work financially."

Now, here is the important part, fellow small business owners: Horny Toad and ZaneRay are looking to license out the product. Though their focus is mostly the outdoor industry, the product could work in any retail store with a bit of modification. The early market will be the small business with roughly $20 million to $50 million in annual sales. But eventually the Buyer's Tool Box will be available to even smaller businesses. Company executives expect there will be a self-service model that essentially any firm can use.

As far as I can see, if you're running a small retail business you need every tool you can get to compete against the national chain almost certainly sitting down the road. This could have a place in your own tool box.