The Supply Chain and Inventory Planning Blog

This year’s Amazon Prime Day was record breaking generating $1 bn in sales. Not only did Amazon beat it’s own Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, but sales also increased 60% year over year relative to last year’s Prime Day. Amazon continues to dominate e-commerce and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. But, as we said in our previous post, we definitely believe that there is room in the market for digitally native brands to succeed. They just need to compete on a different dimension rather than trying to beat Amazon at the game that it’s mastered - convenience.

As Amazon continues to grow and dominate, we think that Amazon Prime Day has valuable lessons for growing brands that they can apply to their own business models successfully.

1. The membership model works really really well if you’re fulfilling a real need

While subscriptions of one sort or another have long been in vogue for ecommerce companies, not all of these companies have been successful over the long-term. This year, a record number of customers signed up for Prime Day, demonstrating that the membership or subscription model can work really well, but it needs to have several key components. Namely that the benefits have to be unique, exclusive and drive significant value to the customer. 

The thing that makes Prime Day so special is that it is available to only Amazon Prime members. Most e-commerce subscription providers tend to provide a subscription for the sake of stabilizing their own revenue and cash flow and not necessarily because they offer something unique, exclusive and valuable to the customer. 

That being said, companies like Stitch Fix and Dia & Co. have been successful because they provide exactly that. In the case of a company like Dia, they’re meeting an untapped market need for plus size clothing and have a unique offering in a space where there’s a clear market gap. Literally the perfect use case for a membership model. 

2.  Don’t be afraid to run experiments

In a way, Prime Day is one big experiment for Amazon. The company has used it to test new product lines and releases or supply chain innovations with the focus shifting slightly each year. Once it becomes clear what worked and what didn’t, Amazon can use the plethora of data to improve throughout the remainder of the year. 

While most e-commerce brands do have a strong ethic of A/B testing whether it’s landing pages, marketing copy or other initiatives, it can be hard to run potentially game changing experiments and take big risks as a small company. But, that being said, what Amazon and other successful e-commerce players like Jet have taught us is that big bets can pay off. In an ecosystem where retail continues to be challenged, those who innovate successfully and take bold steps to reinvent their business models even when they seem to be working will be the ones who come out on top. 

3. Make sure your supply chain and logistics are in order before ramping up marketing

While in the past Amazon has had some technical snafus related to Prime Day, the company has certainly succeeded in making sure everything went smoothly this year. While Amazon has a particular strength in supply chain and logistics, the lessons from its past technical malfunctions can teach smaller brands a thing or two.

Similar to the Amazon example, you don’t want to spend a ton of time, effort and money driving traffic to your site when that traffic can’t convert due to a shopping cart glitch (back in 2016), or, on the supply chain side, when you’re out of the inventory you’re advertising. At Fuse, one of the most common problems we encounter is a lack of coordination between the marketing and the supply chain teams. 

While marketing may launch a meticulously planned, omni-channel campaign, too often we find that these campaigns don’t take into account critical questions like if the campaign has the desired impact, can the company actually fulfill the orders? Will there be enough inventory to satisfy demand? While it seems obvious in hindsight, it usually takes a crisis or two for e-commerce brands to streamline the coordination between functions. 

As your company grows and scales and focuses on putting these lessons into practice, Fuse is here to help you focus on your business, not your inventory.

Are you an Inventory Planner? Have you ever tried to explain to your friends or coworkers what you do and had a hard time getting them to really get it?

Are you a business owner building a brand who’s been told that you should hire a planner? Have you wondered to yourself, ‘why?’ and ‘what would she help me with?’

If you fall into either of these two buckets, this post is for you! If you’re an underappreciated planner, we hope you can send this to your friends and coworkers so that they truly understand how much you contribute to your company. If you’re a business owner who’s new to ops but wants to scale, we hope we can persuade you to get an inventory planner before you run into a major operational crisis like stocking out of your top selling SKUs.

First, let’s start with some basic definitions. Inventory planners help companies:

1. Determine how much inventory they need to order. 

Just like Goldilocks, growing businesses need just the right amount of inventory to survive. Order too little and you risk stocking out, damaging your credibility with your customers and harming your brand. Order too much and you can wind up with hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars of wasted inventory. The capital you invested may be permanently lost, crippling you from investing in other critical business initiatives like products that are selling well or marketing to attract new customers. Inventory planners do a complex optimization exercise every year, quarter, month and even week to make sure that just the right amount of inventory across all products has been ordered.

2. Determine when the inventory needs to arrive.

It’s not enough to simply order enough inventory, but the inventory planner’s role is also to make sure that it arrives when it’s needed. If a company has a three month lead time, discovering that more inventory is needed the week before isn’t helpful. Conversely, if the inventory will sell through eventually but is just sitting in the company’s warehouse for six months, that capital could certainly have been put to better use. Timing is a critical piece of the planning equation.

3. Aligning with sales and marketing. 

Marketing and sales are always trying to drive business. A critical input into planning are questions like “what promos are we running this month?” and “what big wholesale accounts do we expect to win next year?” Inventory planners work closely with marketing and sales to make sure that there is the right amount of product to support and prepare for the big wins expected to come from these initiatives. In prior blog posts, we’ve highlighted the importance of coordinating with operations if you’re in sales or marketing. 

So, why are Inventory Planners important?

Well, we hope that after reading our definitions, the picture all starts to come together. Yet, the unfortunate reality remains that inventory planning remains one of the most misunderstood and least appreciated functions at growing brands. 

So, here’s what we think. Inventory is either the #1 or #2 investment that companies make. If it’s #2, it’s second only to marketing. An investment this big, if not managed properly, can and has been the cause of failure. The less capital you have to play with, the more important it is to optimize that investment. While there is a lot to be done downstream in the supply chain, and we’ve highlighted this in our post on 7 supply chain questions you need to answer, the best optimization on the fulfilment side can’t help you if you’ve ordered the wrong amount of inventory. Because of this, the person who plans your inventory - makes sure you’re investing enough and makes sure it’s coming in on time - is one of the most important people in your company and one of the earliest roles all consumer brands should hire for early on. 

Whether you’re an inventory planner with decades of experience or a start-up founder who’s just coming to grips with the importance of operations and inventory, Fuse is here to help you focus on your business, not your inventory.

Over the past year, we’ve learned that many young companies are financing their inventory completely the wrong way. What’s the wrong way to finance inventory? With venture capital funding. 

Why you don’t need VC funding for your brand

First and foremost, unless you have a completely new business model (like Dollar Shave Club or Birchbox when they were first starting out) or something else that’s extremely innovative about the brand you’re building, venture capital funding is probably not right for you. If you do take VC funding, it should be used exclusively to drive your business’ hiring and marketing needs. These are important investments in growth and worth selling a piece of your company for. But, given that there are many other ways to finance your inventory, selling a big chunk of your company to do so doesn’t make any sense. 

At this point, you might be asking yourself, well if I can’t use venture funding, what should I do? Here are three options:

1. Your Suppliers and Manufacturers

Our advisor, Lisa Hom, who’s starting a new brand called Kaleido Concepts and has been an executive at multiple $100 mm+ brands, plans to finance her inventory by, “...getting creative when working with manufactures and suppliers. It all comes down to cash flow. The strategy should be to pay your manufacturers for the goods after you sell them. I asked a manufacturer for terms of net 120 days, meaning that I didn't have to pay him for the goods until 120 days after he shipped the product.  So it gave me 90 days to sell it and not have to pay for the goods out of my cash.”

While it may take a bit of leverage to get that type of accommodation from a supplier, most founders don’t even know that they can ask. Many manufacturers feel that they are falling behind and are eager to partner with founders who can educate them on the world of e-commerce. When starting a new brand, you need to talk to suppliers from a place of strength, so getting creative about what your strengths are is super valuable. Moreover, we’ve seen several start-ups partner with their supplier by letting them take an equity stake in the company. Not only does it give you capital, but it also completely aligns your incentives.

2. A Letter of Credit

Now that you’re in business and actually have sales, you can go get a letter of credit from a bank. The letter of credit will demonstrate to your suppliers that you will be able to pay them. This letter of credit not only allows you to purchase more inventory than you otherwise could, but it also allows you to negotiate better payment terms with your suppliers. Now that you have more inventory, you can drive higher sales, increase the amount guaranteed by the bank, buy even more inventory and do it all over again. So long as the inventory is selling, you’ll continue to be able to use this approach to finance your business.

3. Inventory Factoring

Finally, although inventory factoring sometimes gets a bad name, there are great companies like Dwight Funding, who are revolutionizing the world of inventory factoring and taking a modern approach to working with young companies. Inventory factoring is when a company takes on debt to finance inventory against its future sales or accounts receivable. This can be especially effective when you work with large retailers like Sephora, Nordstrom and others that commit to purchasing large amounts of product for the upcoming season well in advance. These receivables can be leveraged to get a loan in order to be able to buy the inventory that will support these large contracts. 

What do you need to be successful?

If you pursue these strategies, you need to maintain trust with the third parties you work with by forecasting your demand and inventory needs accurately. If you’re unable to pay your supplier because you’ve vastly overestimated the sellthru rate of your inventory or your factoring partner can’t get a straight answer on what you expect this year, these partnerships won’t be successful. That’s where a tool like Fuse comes in to help you forecast demand and inventory more accurately. Planning inventory and getting it right is our bread and butter. As a scrappy start-up, our tool can help you gain leverage and continue to forecast easily and accurately as you grow your SKU count and monthly order volume without throwing more bodies at the problem. No matter how you choose to finance your inventory, Fuse is here to help you focus on your business, not your inventory.

When we first started Fuse, we had several key hypotheses as to how we could improve the way inventory planning is done by retailers today. First, we were convinced that it’s impossible to plan a growing business in Excel. As the volume of data and the number of SKUs grow, it’s easy to make errors in Excel and, in fact, impossible not to when you’ve linked several spreadsheets and Excel is crashing mid-save. Excel’s capabilities are limited, and thus planners must rely on backward-looking metrics like sell-thru and historical growth rates, which don’t accurately paint a picture of their growing business. Second, an algorithm can better detect anomalies and accurately estimate seasonality than a human whose attention is divided amongst the many other urgent priorities of the day.

After working with our early customers for some time, we’re proud to say that both our hypotheses were correct -- we’ve found that the ROI of using Fuse makes a meaningful, material difference on both the revenue and the cost side.

10% More Revenue

On the revenue side, we’ve found that Fuse helps our customers achieve 10% more revenue. We did a deep dive into our customers’ biggest quarter - Q4. First, we took a look at stockouts in Q4. We defined a stockout as zero sales with 95% confidence. This means that we excluded instances in which zero sales could have legitimately meant no demand for the product. Second, we assumed that our customer’s revenue target for Q4 was equal to actual Q4 sales. In reality, given the number of stock-outs our customers experienced (more on that below), the revenue target was likely most definitely higher than the sales figures actually achieved. Finally, at Fuse, we always encourage our customers to modify the forecast by including relevant details like product launch dates, products that are phasing out, as well as other information they might know about their business that an algorithm doesn’t. For purposes of our analysis, however, we excluded that information. 

Even assuming the above simplifications, we found that our customers could have made 10% more revenue and avoided 450 stock-outs (on average) during Q4 if they’d followed Fuse’s algorithm. In fact, one of our earliest customers who joined the platform in Q4 had zero stock-outs in Q1. 

What does this mean? Well, for one thing, it means that Excel is definitely not the right tool for growing businesses to plan inventory. In addition, it also means that even without additional input from our customers, Fuse’s initial predictions (based on seasonality) can achieve dramatically better results for our customers.

Reduce Overspend on Inventory by 3x

What we often find with the growing companies we work with is that a significant stock-out in the past, or paranoia about stocking out, leads to panic overbuying. This ties up precious capital and resources in inventory that could be deployed elsewhere. 

In Fuse, we use a forward-looking weeks of supply target to help customers maintain a lean inventory buffer. We often find that many of our customers are managing their buffer using sell-thru (which is backwards looking) or a historical weeks of supply target. For a growing business, these backward looking metrics don’t reflect current trends, and can lead to dangerous overbuying. However, with Fuse, it’s now possible to look forwards instead of backwards, thanks to our accurate forecast and real-time actualization of sales.

We took our customer’s forward-looking weeks of supply target (based on Fuse’s forecast) and applied it to create a recommended inventory buy and replenishment recommendation. What we found was that on average, our customers were overstocked in almost 200 products and spending 3x what they needed to on inventory. By following Fuse’s recommendations, our customers can dramatically reduce their inventory spend and more efficiently manage their working capital, freeing up cash for initiatives that will grow their business, like customer acquisition.

Conclusion

Our data shows that prior to Fuse, our customers were buying not enough of the right SKUs and too much of the wrong SKUs. With Fuse, our customers can switch this around and invest more capital on the right SKUs and less on the wrong SKUs. At Fuse, we’re here to help you focus on your business, not your inventory. 

A few months ago, we published a post on why we believe that digitally native brands can and will be successful. First, they are well positioned to completely own the customer experience. Second, it’s easier to find and target the brand’s ideal customer online. Finally, there are many storefronts (like Shopify and Big Commerce) to choose from that look great and don’t require a team of engineers.

How do consumers feel about luxury e-commerce?

But, can the same logic be applied to luxury items? According to Bain’s Spring 2016 Global Luxury outlook, growth of luxury goods has slowed to 1%. In the US, specifically, the luxury market is in decline due to limited domestic spending and no support from tourism. However, amidst this grim outlook, e-commerce is gaining ground on traditional channels and is expected to grow by 15% per year through 2020. 

We ran a survey to understand how consumers feel about purchasing luxury items online. An overwhelming majority (90%) of our respondents said that they would buy a luxury item online, which is great news for brands. But, many of them caveat that there are only certain kinds of luxury items that they feel comfortable purchasing. First, they prefer purchasing from brands they already know. Second, they prefer to have interacted with the brand first in store. Finally, if it’s an item with a very specific fit, they want to have tried it on in advance.

Customer experience is key to success in luxury

We asked two up and coming brands, Floravere and SENREVE, in two very different industries (wedding gowns and handbags, respectively) to share how they tackle these customer needs.

According to Emily Ambrose at Floravere, “There is nothing more luxurious than serving the customer on her terms.  We deliver wedding dresses directly to the customer, so she doesn't need to hunt down the one dress. Instead, she can try-on in the comfort of home with her loved ones and no pushy sales people. Going digitally native gives us the opportunity to offer unprecedented customer service in our space.” 

Julia Mehra at SENREVE shared a similar perspective: “Luxury purchasers are increasingly turning to online retailers to satisfy their wants and needs. Our SENREVE woman is very busy, so shopping online suits her lifestyle. We’re seeing shopping behavior on our site indicating that the online model fits well with the modern woman’s schedule. We serve these women by delivering a beautiful, timeless, elegant bag for the modern, successful, on-the-go woman.”

Interestingly, both brands defined luxury not simply based on the nature of the good, but also based on convenience of the experience. Recognizing that fit is important, Floravere creatively opted to ship samples in multiple sizes and supplements the experience with a personal stylist. 

And so is building your brand over time

We believe that digitally native brands can be successful in the luxury goods market, but to do so, they’ll need to recognize that the experience of luxury has changed. Retailers must deliver on a customized experience that sacrifices none of the quality and achieves all of the service. Like with anything that is new, it takes time. Time to change generations of retail experience. It takes good word of mouth. It takes a dedicated set of initial customers who are willing to try it out.  And, then, your brand, your product, your service has to speak for itself.

Whether you’re a luxury e-commerce brand or not, Fuse is here to help you focus on your business, not your inventory.