How BaseCamp Drives Franchise Sales Growth with Delphina AI

The data challenge at BaseCamp: stretched thin across 300 stores with mountains of untapped data

BaseCamp Franchising supports franchisees that operate over 300 resale retail stores across the United States under two national brands: Uptown Cheapskate and Kid to Kid. Every item bought and sold is a unique SKU, meaning every store has its own inventory mix, customer patterns, and operational rhythms. Each location generates a lot of data, but as full-time business owners supported by a lean centralized Field Ops team, it was not previously possible to fully analyze all of that data to make quick, impactful decisions.

Before Delphina, creating a single performance chart meant exporting data, filtering it, building pivot tables, and formatting everything manually. A 365-day store analysis took five or six hours of clicking through systems and reports. When franchisees asked questions during live calls, the honest answer was often: "I'll get back to you when I can."

With a wealth of data at individual stores and across the franchise network, the opportunity cost was growing. Co-CEO Zach Gordon was acutely aware of how much was going untapped and turned to Delphina to see if the AI data agent could help.

Transformation 1: New leverage — when the CEO becomes the analyst

"Delphina gave us data that was illuminating: there are many customers who come to our stores just once. Why is that? Frankly, it unlocked a huge marketing opportunity and we've started a whole new project for this year."

— Zach Gordon, Co-CEO, BaseCamp Franchising

Six weeks before BaseCamp's annual meeting, Co-CEO Zach Gordon had a problem. His team had been trying to build a customer frequency report for six months — how often shoppers and vendors were returning to each store across the entire franchise system. It kept getting bumped: other time-sensitive priorities, limited bandwidth, the usual.

So Zach tried something different. He opened Delphina and started asking questions himself.

Forty minutes later, he had the report: a complete breakdown of every store in the system — how many customers had visited once, twice, three times or more, on both the buy and sell side, across all of 2025. The kind of analysis that would have taken days, if it happened at all.

But the report was not the real story. What the data showed was that a lot of customers were only coming once at certain stores. Why? Nobody knew. And that question — the one the data opened up, not closed — became a new company initiative for 2026.

That moment crystallized something. Zach did not stop. Since BaseCamp rolled out Delphina, he has run over 200 analysis chats himself — across pricing strategy, customer cohorts, store performance, and inventory.

Transformation 2: The knowledge layer — when Delphina learned the business, not just the data

"We told Delphina how we think about our business — our inventory philosophy, the importance of inventory turns — and now it gives us recommendations that actually make sense for how we operate. No BI tool has ever been able to do that."

— Zach Gordon, Co-CEO, BaseCamp Franchising

Most analytics tools answer the question you ask in isolation. What they cannot do is understand why you are asking it — or what the right answer looks like for your specific business.

Early in BaseCamp's Delphina rollout, the team noticed something. When consultants asked about inventory strategy, Delphina's recommendations did not always align with how stores actually operate. For a resale franchise, buying inventory is the business, but some responses were steering in the wrong direction.

Zach fixed it in minutes. Using Delphina's knowledge agent, he documented how BaseCamp thinks about inventory management — their philosophy, their thresholds, their merchandising logic. From that point on, Delphina's answers reflected BaseCamp's strategy, not generic retail assumptions.

That is the capability that separates Delphina from dashboards and traditional BI: it does not just query your data, it learns the context around it. Strategy documents, metric definitions, operational guidelines — all of it becomes part of how Delphina reasons. The answers get sharper the more context it has, and adding that context requires no engineering work.

Transformation 3: Real-time analysis for franchise owners — from "I'll get back to you" to decisions made live

"The ability to just ask Delphina a question while I'm on a virtual meeting and to get the answer in the moment… just gives us so much flexibility to add immediate value to our store owners."

— Katie Nabong, Field Operations Consultant

When BaseCamp first deployed Delphina, the dynamic on franchisee calls shifted almost immediately. Instead of "I'll get back to you," consultants could pull a chart on the spot and make data-driven decisions together with store owners, right then and there.

Field Operations Consultant Vicky Strozykowski described what that looks like in practice. She was working with a franchisee in inventory planning who insisted — based on gut feel — that she needed fewer pieces of size 10 clothing. Vicky queried Delphina during the call. The data said otherwise: size 10 was one of the store's top sellers. "Her face was like, 'Oh, really?' And I said, 'Oh.' And you know what the data is saying? 'Actually, one of your top sellers is your size 10.'"

For an underperforming location, Consultant Laura Teachworth used Delphina to identify a pricing issue: average retail price was notably above system benchmarks, with unusually high discount rates required to complete each sale. With Delphina, it was natural to drill deeper into the categories driving the gap — jeans and shoes — and build a targeted training plan on the spot.

In another case, Consultant Jeff Miller worked with a store owner who needed help investigating a 34.6% drop in vendor activity at one location. The owner's instinct was to blame marketing, but with Delphina's quick reasoning, Miller asked the right questions to uncover a different story. What surfaced was a clear timeline: the decline began on January 1st, one day before the store manager resigned. The data reframed the conversation entirely — and pointed to an actionable solution.

"Queries that would have taken a couple days now take minutes for our team and executives."

— Jeff Pauletti, Field Operations Consultant

Across stores and challenge areas, this shift from question to immediate data-driven conviction is now how BaseCamp's field team operates. Each field ops consultant reclaims 15–20 hours per week, redirected from data mining to high-value franchisee consulting. Consultants proactively analyze store performance, identify struggling locations before franchisees even ask, and deliver strategic guidance instead of delayed reports.

How it spread and what's next

"We went from setup to value faster than any tool I've used — and my team needed zero hand-holding to get there. It's been amazing to witness."

— Zach Gordon, Co-CEO, BaseCamp Franchising

With a stretched team, new tools often went unactivated. Zach was candid about this: getting people to actually adopt a tool and use it habitually — without hand-holding — was almost always a long uphill battle, until now.

Even the skeptics came around. One team member worried Delphina might replace their job until they tried it and realized it gave leverage and created value. After testing, their review was: "This thing is incredible. Every question I've asked has been answered with great detail. I love the charts and now can exert greater influence on our company."

Within weeks of rollout, the team was logging hundreds of queries each week and power users emerged organically. Consultant Jeff Pleti built a shared library of templated queries that the whole team could draw from, including 365-day store performance reviews, Black Friday comparisons, margin tracking, and conference prep analyses. Knowledge that used to live in individual heads started compounding across the team.

Other centralized business teams are starting to test Delphina, but the longer-term vision is more ambitious: giving franchisees themselves the ability to diagnose their own stores.

"For franchises, the dream for any franchisor is to have the diagnosis of problems be self-served by the franchisee. That's amazing."

— Zach Gordon, Co-CEO, BaseCamp Franchising

With double-digit results showing up across stores, the momentum of data-driven insights is growing, and Zach believes the team is just getting started with Delphina by their side.

See what Delphina can do for your team

BaseCamp's adoption of Delphina shows what is possible when franchise networks pair deep operational data with an AI layer that learns how the business actually runs — faster answers in the field, executives who can self-serve strategic analysis, and consultants who spend time on coaching instead of spreadsheet wrangling.

Ready to see how Delphina works for your team? Schedule a demo.