Proof, honestly.

A 20% stock undercount, found before it moved a reorder

TikTok Shop stock was reading 20% light because one SKU was recorded under two names, and 4,800 units sat outside the count. Catching it on the call meant the next order was sized against real stock instead of a shortfall that never existed.

A viral spike absorbed with price and ad levers, not panic POs

A creator video on the StogieStay cigar magnet took it from about $100 a day to $6,000 a day overnight. The Mudslayer held 50 units a day, sustained. We doubled the price and paused ads to slow the burn to what the supply chain could actually serve, instead of firing an emergency PO into a spike that might not last the month.

A season definition fixed, and every order quantity with it

The plan treated golf as a three-month season. The sales data said April through September, with Father’s Day and the Masters as peaks. Reorder velocity was re-cut against six months, which changes every quantity downstream from it.

A holiday PO forecast built backwards from the shelf date

Black Friday and December can carry a third of the year. So we built a dedicated holiday forecast to land FBA stock by mid-October, and let that date set the order date rather than the other way round.

Our Place: DTC cookware, a scoped shipment-planning lane

One lane, not the whole supply chain: multi-region FBA stock planning and warehouse-to-FBA transfer execution across Amazon US, Canada, UK, and Australia, running out of Carson and Redlands in California, Texas, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Toronto, and a UK 3PL.

In a single week before Prime Day: 216 pallets, close to 14,000 to 15,000 units, leaving nearly every warehouse at once, against roughly 120,000 Amazon US units already in position. We stood up QVC freight alongside it, including a 67-pallet order.

The 2024 baseline was manual sending with no optimization. We built the workflow from scratch on distance and surplus quantity, and it cut estimated Amazon carrier charges to under about $500 to $900 a shipment. When a relocation split Carson and Redlands, we untangled the allocation and re-routed misplaced Wonder Oven Pro stock before Prime Day and BFCM.

Proves: one lane, run properly, at real scale

A multi-category Amazon seller, ~500 SKUs Name not cleared

The full supply-chain desk, daily: order entry and approval, PO tracking, freight and forwarder coordination, urgent-shipment triage, supplier-payment verification, FBA and AWD placement, and days-of-stock rules enforced in a daily KPI meeting. Freight quoting runs through a ship calculator we built into their Airtable, so volumetric cost, cost per unit, and forwarder choice are settled before an order is approved.

In the record: a 15,000-unit holiday order that had to leave China in August. 500 pallets cleared out of a warehouse on 20 days’ notice. A lost supplier payment traced and recovered before a second payment went out to a changed bank account. A forwarder relationship rescued after operations were throttled for three days over a ~$30k unpaid invoice.

We also settled an argument the company was having with itself. Two teams were calling stock low at 45 days and 60 days. One threshold now applies everywhere, with FBA targeted at 90 to 150 days of cover.

Proves: the desk holds when the week goes wrong

Samako: cleaning tech out of Amsterdam

Robot vacuums, stick vacuums, and cleaning devices, sold across Shopify, Bol.com, which is the dominant marketplace in the Netherlands, and Amazon EU, where an active German expansion brings battery-registration compliance with it.

We run the day-to-day supply chain: supplier communication, a 20-day QC booking and a 15-day container booking, PO placement and tracking, stock synced across Shopify, Bol.com, and the 3PL, and cash-flow and payment-term forecasting by SKU and month. The master planning sheet we built is the single source of truth for PO status, ETAs, and cost, worked to a twice-weekly checklist instead of ad-hoc daily edits.

Spare-parts forecasting runs at 70-80% accuracy and feeds stockout prevention. In a slow Chinese New Year month we used the same sheet to bring stock down to a level that ties up less cash. The work helped drive a record Bol.com month in February, which is a weak season there.

Proves: the model travels across borders

Homefield Apparel: collegiate and licensed sports apparel

Minneapolis-based, DTC on Shopify plus wholesale into campus bookstores and EDI retailers. The catalog runs into the thousands of SKUs: one export ran past 9,600 rows, and one system view held more than 14,000 orders.

Fall wholesale ships in mid-June and is finalized by mid-January, so a size decision made in January cannot be walked back. We forecast at SKU level on parent and child size matrices, split wholesale from DTC, stagger deliveries across summer and fall, and carry a 5,000-unit neutral blanks buffer because playoff runs are not forecastable.

Onboarded in two weeks onto Monday.com, the NetSuite to Fulfil ERP transition, Shopify, and three blanks vendors with three different SKU nomenclatures. Then we started writing down the multi-layer MOQ logic, style level around 48 pieces and color level 300 plus, that had only ever lived in the inventory manager’s head and the factory’s. We also built the slow-moving and dead-stock report after spotting the gap, and took over the weekly multi-system wholesale-availability reconciliation that had been running by hand.

Proves: planning that holds at four to five month lead times