I work for a large retail dot com specializing in halloween costumes and I’ve just been given a big project with not much direction at all. Basically, we’ve just had programming make up a excel spreadsheet of all 5,000 costumes that’s broken down each costume by size. As instructed, I broke it down by children, adult, male, female, and have quantity of unique costumes we have for each size in each category. The spreadsheet also has quantity sold for 2009, 2008 and 2009 YTD figures. I also have access to profitability figures for each costume. Also made a ranking for each size in each costume (“Large Adult Buzz Lightyear” is highest selling, “medium Adult Buzz Lightyear” is second highest etc) and trying to look for patterns. This is all well and fine, but I’m going be presenting this stuff to the CEO soon, and I don’t want to get up there and be telling him a bunch of stuff he probably already knows. Anyone have any ideas of what I can do to, well, wow the pants off of my superiors with my “outside the box thinking” and analytical super powers? Just looking for some analytical ideas I can do with this size project, that may actually be useful to the company. I’m just not sure where else to go with this project.
what exactly is your task? just to organize costumes in terms of profitability or something similar? I think the profitability of a costume is directly proportional to the popularity of the character its based on. The most profitable costumes this year will be related to the newest and hit movies for children/ adults. and then of course you have the classic, zombie, pirate, etc costumes that always sell. you could also use the information and look at the hit movies/tv shows for each year and see if the profitability of past costumes correlate. then again, Im sure the CEO knows that too haha.
Maybe break it down into some pie charts giving from highest% to lowest% for example one chart could be strictly for sizes (it would show the %'s of large costumes orders, medium, small …etc) then another one by character (pirate, buzzlightyear…etc) and another one by maybe a broader catergory (Film Costumes(Buzz, jack sparrow…etc), Generic Costumes (clowns, pirates…etc) this way at the end you can link to show which sections have the most demand (Film Costumes --> Buzz–> Large) and this way maybe see a trend that in buying patterns this way. I don’t know just a thought 
not to mention its better to look at then just an excel spreadsheet. Hard to give suggestions without knowing the actual tast but I hope it helped
Looks like you have a lot of the base data. You could benefit from cross referecing the trend data against macro trends. For example, finding links between what is selling with movie interest and carryover to the next year. For example, data on movie interest and trends should be readily available. Take something like the Harry Potter series and see the trends in demand for those costumes over the lifespan of the franchise. Create a life expectancy and value for given costumes over several years. Perhaps that would help the CEO make decisions based in purchase and marketing inventory.