Alan Barnett

Alan Barnett is a Partner with Lightship Partners with over 30 years of experience in retail and wholesale.  Mr. Barnett has held senior positions with Luxury, Apparel & Specialty, Furniture, and Off Price retailers including: Barneys New York, Loehmann’s, Levitz Furniture, Steve and Barry’s, Victoria’s Secret Stores, and in wholesale with The Arrow Shirt Company.  In addition, for the last 9 years, Alan Barnett has served as an advisor to a large Chinese apparel manufacturing firm that caters to better, bridge, and designer labels including Theory, Tahari, Kate Spade, J. Crew, and Zara.

Mr. Barnett advises Wholesale/Manufacturing and Retail clients on merchandise planning, inventory optimization, strategies to improve sales and profit at retail, sourcing, demand planning, and merchandising business processes;  He also advises on the integration of actionable reporting  and  BI tools into existing company cultures and operations, , and systems selection and implementation; and has recently served as interim COO for a start-up web business.

Mr. Barnett is  a frequent featured speaker at industry conferences and boards.  Most recently he has discussed how wholesale and manufacturing firms can use EDI/POS data to improve their sales and margin at retail as well as improve Demand/Production Planning. He has spoken at the Technology and Operations Store Summit, the Retail Connections Summit, the Merchandise Innovation and Excellence Conference, and the Consortium for Operational Excellence in Retail Conference at The Wharton and Harvard Business Schools.

Mr. Barnett is an Adjunct Lecturer at CUNY’s Baruch College, teaching a BA and an MBA course on Retail.  He received an M.B.A. from The Wharton School, where he received a Marketing Fellowship, and earned his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.