The Supply Chain and Inventory Planning Blog

After conducting almost 200 customer interviews, we’ve gained some insight into what separates the great from the good when it comes to inventory.

We started by asking our advisor, Oseyi Ikuenobe, the Senior Product Manager of @WalmartLabs’ Smart Forecasting product for his thoughts. At @WalmartLabs, Oseyi and a team of data scientists and engineers plans the inventory for Walmart’s $13 bn e-commerce business. 

Inventory management should have ROI benchmarks

According to Oseyi, "The best inventory strategy is one that allows you to buy the 'right amounts of the right inventory' to maximize revenue, profitability and growth. Instead of trying to simply control costs, it is better to think of inventory decisions the way we think of marketing spend - in terms of ROI. Once you have that mindset, you quickly realize that the ultimate smart inventory solution is one that can synthesize the collective wisdom of the organization and deploy it to drive decision making."

We’ve gleaned two insights from Oseyi’s thoughts:

1. Best-in-class retailers think about inventory as an investment, not a cost center
2. Collaboration between key functional areas is key to successful inventory planning

Reframing inventory as an investment

We work mostly with start-ups and all too often we see them allocating a fixed budget to inventory. But, inventory is an investment, much like marketing. The investment that a company makes in its inventory supports the company’s sales target. We’d propose that companies go through a series of questions to set their inventory budget:

1. What is our marketing budget?
2. Based on our marketing spend and our organic reach, what is our revenue target?
3. How much product do we need to sell to support our revenue target?

This third question is the start of the planning process. Once the revenue target is established, a planner can go through and make a determination regarding the product mix and volume of product needed. 

Collaboration improves inventory planning

The process described above only works if there is tight collaboration between all of the functional areas that impact sales like finance, marketing, merchandising and operations. 

Unfortunately, we have seen a lot of avoidable crises caused because one functional area forgot to tell operations about planned changes. Things like changing the discount amount on a promo or A/B tests planned on the site. While these lapses might seem small, they can have a big impact if there isn’t enough product in stock to support these initiatives.

So What?

We want to encourage our customers to reframe the way you think about inventory: it’s not your biggest cost center, it’s your biggest investment. At Fuse, we’re designing a tool to help automate the grunt work of planning so that you can focus on important, strategic decisions. 

We’re here to help you focus on your business, not your inventory.

At Fuse, we are excited about the wave of online first brands that we’ve seen succeed over the past decade. In a recent post by Andy Dunn, he called these brands “digitally native vertical brands” and later, “v-commerce”.

Will digitally native e-commerce brands succeed?

We asked Matt Heiman, a consumer investor at Greylock to share his perspective: “My view is that vertically focused direct to consumer online brands are better positioned than pure 3rd party e-commerce concepts over the next few years. Particularly as Amazon approaches 40% of US e-commerce, competing with them is extremely difficult, so the idea of creating a new brand and owning your own customer experience is a better position. Some examples of brands I think have done this well are Casper, Dollar Shave Club and Warby Parker.”

We agree with Matt, and we think that the sale of Dollar Shave Club to Unilever earlier this year for $1 bn has convinced others that it’s possible to build a valuable brand that caters to a different kind of consumer online. Dollar Shave Club’s true value is in the company’s fantastic brand and it’s ability to appeal to and engage with Millennial consumers in an authentic way over social media and other digital marketing channels (1).

E-commerce platforms make it easy to build a brand

We’re seeing this trend first hand at Fuse. Our target customers are fast growing companies with at least 25 employees and anywhere from $10 - $100 million of revenue who are excelling at building their own online first brands. One company, Ipsy, knows all about brand building. Ipsy was started byMichelle Phan, who built her own personal brand as a make-up guru on YouTube. As the company has evolved, the brand which originally appealed to Michelle’s followers and the make-up obsessed, has started to reach more casual consumers looking to expand their horizons.

The good news for many of our customers is that it’s much easier to build a strong brand online today than it was five years ago. Due to the proliferation of front-end e-commerce platforms like Shopify,BigCommerce and Squarespace, it’s much easier to build a great brand with minimal upfront investment. With the emergence of Shopify Plus as an enterprise e-commerce platform for companies looking to scale, we expect this trend to continue.

Inventory management systems haven't kept up (until now)

Although this is good news for many aspiring brand builders, the unfortunate reality is that back-end tools and platforms haven’t necessarily kept up with the front-end. Shopify has done a great job building an ecosystem around its API, but there are still a lot of gaps on the back-end. That’s where we at Fuse come in. Our goal is to help simplify the inventory planning process to help companies answer the key question related to their biggest investment: “How much should I order?” We’re really excited about the growth of online first brands in the market, and are just as excited to be able to help those brands focus on their business, not their inventory.

(1) Source: Bloomberg