In some cases, you are the whole LP team. Auror VP Ruby Arden kicked off a recent Loss Prevention Foundation webinar with that statement. The leaders on the panel proved retailers don’t need large loss prevention (LP) teams to see big results.
Heritage Grocers Group more than doubled the amount of cases they entered last year while Boot Barn saw an even greater increase in closed cases. Both retailers described their loss prevention (LP) teams as lean and achieved these retails without adding a single LP hire. Lean has become the default size in LP, for retailers big and small. What separates the teams getting results is the mindset that they can do more with less, and the tools to make that belief a reality.
Key takeaways
- One Heritage store documented 25 events on a single person of interest taking $10 to $15 at a time, cleared California's $1K felony threshold, and secured a conviction.
- Boot Barn halved the time it takes a store to report an event, from 40 minutes to 20.
- Holt Renfrew's six-store team now works organized retail crime cases worth $10K to $30K on average, prioritized by intelligence rather than instinct.
Heritage Grocers Group: A $15 theft, documented 25 times, became a felony conviction
Before Auror, Heritage Grocers Group lacked a system for logging incidents and reporting cases. Covering 15 to 22 stores in remote areas an hour or more apart, each LP manager felt stretched and, to make matters worse, the cases they did report to the district attorney’s office were often dropped due to thin evidence.
Orlando Torres, Director of Loss Prevention, says the team sometimes lost a full day rebuilding what happened after a caller left for lunch or went home. Ninety-nine percent of store teams speak Spanish only, so anything they were asked to use had to work in their language and take seconds, not minutes.
At a Pomona location, one person of interest (POI) took $10 to $15 at a time, several visits a day. The team logged every incident with photos rather than writing off each one as too small to chase. When the store called 911, officers arrived and the team handed over more than 25 documented cases.
"Talking about this one case itself, that was a no-brainer. We were able to justify [Auror's cost], because our goal was to do this at every single store."
That single case cleared California's $1,000 felony threshold and secured a conviction, in a county where petty theft rarely draws a response. Three arrests came out of the first 90 days of the pilot.
The wider result is adoption: LP is no longer asking stores to report. Instead, other departments have adopted Auror on their own. HR and the Risk and Safety teams use Auror to log in-store accidents and customer complaints.
Boot Barn: Report time halved, and 88% of store teams feel safer
Boot Barn's focus shifted from operational audits to external investigations, almost overnight. Before 2020, 80 to 90% of the LP team's work was operational. Organized retail crime and violence then climbed during the COVID pandemic. The company kept opening stores, and the five-person LP department had to pivot to roughly 90% external investigations with no store-level LP roles. Reports arrived by text, call, and email, every store reported a different way, and repeat offenders surfaced only in hindsight.
Brian Huff, Director of Loss Prevention, now leads a team of 12 covering nearly 600 stores in 49 states. Report time came down from 40 minutes to 20 within a few months on the platform, and the average investigation closes in 30 days. The change that surprised him most was law enforcement’s response time.
"Our store would create an event, and within minutes a crime analyst for the local police department would reach out to the store. Our [regional loss prevention manager] hadn't even had a chance to review the event yet, and that police department already had things working, had [the person of interest] ID'd, [and a] warrant issued."
Getting an investigator assigned used to take a week or two. In Houston, a single reported event became 11 linked events worth almost $8,000 inside a week, and the person of interest was arrested less than three weeks later. Cases arrive complete, with images, case numbers, police contacts, and a consistent narrative, so the only work left is the identification and the arrest.
Six stores, one view, and $10K to $30K ORC cases
Holt Renfrew had six stores recording incidents six different ways, no shared case management, and privacy work done by hand, including blurring faces one by one. For Conor Cox, National Director of Loss Prevention, that last point was the bar every vendor had to clear.
"Privacy was a non-negotiable even before we started our relationship with Auror. And to be quite frank, it's where other providers failed. We've been able to check the box with our privacy office, they're really happy."
The team took an 80/20 approach to resourcing, concentrating on frictionless reporting, a security operations center that triages events, and privacy-approved access controls. Greater Toronto Area stores get hit by the same ORC groups, sometimes on the same day, and the team now pushes photos, MO, and trends to every GTA store so the next location can add controls and brief its people first. Average ORC case value sits between $10,000 and $30,000, built from events that would each have been written off at around $1,000. Automated facial redaction gave back the hours the team used to spend blurring by hand.
Three retailers, three versions of “lean”, one conclusion: lean resources doesn’t have to mean fewer results. None of these teams got bigger. What changed is that the $15 thefts are now documented and stacked, a store event now reaches a crime analyst in minutes, and six stores now see one picture instead of six. That is what the network does for a small team.
Watch the full episode to hear Conor's three non-negotiables for evaluating loss prevention tools as a lean LP team leader in a luxury environment, why Orlando says user-friendly beats feature-rich when there’s a language barrier and most of your store teams have little experience with technology, and how Brian dropped a redundant audit process to nearly double his team's store visits.
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