Inventory Planner / Forecaster

## Fractional Merchandise & Inventory Planner – DTC Apparel We are a fast-growing, 8-figure DTC apparel company looking for an experienced **Merchandise Planner / Inventory Planning Specialist** to help us build a better forecasting and replenishment system. This is **not a basic inventory-management or data-entry role**. We are looking for someone who has real experience forecasting inventory for a DTC/e-commerce apparel brand and can turn historical sales, inventory levels, marketing performance, and lead times into actionable purchasing decisions. ### The Problem We're Solving Our business historically operated around limited-edition product drops. As we've grown, we've identified a group of products that perform extremely well as evergreen products and through paid advertising. Our challenge is that we frequently: * Discover a winning product * Scale paid advertising * Sell through the inventory * Stock out * Lose the ability to advertise the product * Wait approximately 90–100 days for replenishment We want to build a system that allows us to **keep proven winners in stock without over-ordering unproven or declining products.** We have substantial historical sales and SKU-level data available. ### Initial Project We want you to analyze our historical product, inventory, and sales data and help us: * Identify products that should become evergreen/core SKUs * Analyze SKU-level sales velocity * Forecast future demand * Calculate weeks of supply * Establish reorder points * Recommend reorder quantities * Account for approximately 90–100 day production lead times * Establish appropriate safety-stock levels * Account for inventory already on purchase orders * Identify products at risk of stocking out * Identify products where we are overstocked * Incorporate seasonality where appropriate * Incorporate paid advertising performance into forecasts * Account for products whose demand can increase significantly when advertising spend increases * Analyze size-level demand and recommend size curves for apparel * Develop a practical weekly inventory/replenishment process our team can continue using ### An Important Part of Our Business We do **not** want every product treated as evergreen inventory. We operate a hybrid model: **Limited Drops:** Products intentionally produced in limited quantities where scarcity is part of the business model. **Core / Evergreen Products:** Proven products that can sell consistently and/or acquire new customers profitably through paid advertising. We want these products continuously available. A major part of this project is helping us determine **which products belong in each category and how aggressively we should replenish our proven winners.** ### Paid Advertising Matters This is particularly important. Historical sales velocity alone is not enough for our business. Some products may sell moderately through organic traffic but perform exceptionally well when advertised to new customers. These products can become major customer-acquisition drivers if sufficient inventory is available. We want forecasting to incorporate: * Organic sales velocity * Paid sales velocity * New-customer acquisition * Advertising scalability * Planned marketing spend * Product margins The goal is to prevent inventory availability from becoming the bottleneck that stops us from scaling profitable advertising. ### Deliverables The initial engagement should ultimately produce a usable forecasting/replenishment system showing metrics such as: * Current inventory * Units on purchase order * Historical sales velocity * Recent sales velocity * Forecasted demand * Weeks of supply * Lead-time demand * Safety stock * Reorder point * Recommended reorder quantity * Expected stockout date * Size-level recommendations * Overstock/understock flags We want something our team can review **weekly and actually use to make purchasing decisions**, not simply a one-time analysis or presentation. ### Ideal Background We're particularly interested in candidates who have: * Merchandise planning experience * Inventory planning experience * DTC/e-commerce experience * Apparel or fashion experience * SKU-level demand forecasting experience * Replenishment planning experience * Experience with long production lead times * Experience forecasting around promotions or paid advertising * Strong Excel/Google Sheets skills * Experience with Shopify data is a plus Experience working for or consulting with an **8-figure+ consumer brand** is strongly preferred. ### What We Are NOT Looking For We are not looking for: * A general virtual assistant * Basic inventory data entry * A generic data analyst with no merchandise-planning experience * Someone who only builds dashboards * Someone who requires us to develop the forecasting methodology for them We want someone who can look at our data and tell us: **"Here's what you should reorder, here's how much you should order, here's when you need to place the PO, and here's why."** ### Potential Long-Term Opportunity We would like to begin with a project analyzing our current inventory and building the forecasting/replenishment system. If the relationship is successful, we are open to an ongoing fractional engagement where you review inventory and demand with us weekly or monthly and continuously update purchasing recommendations. ### When Applying Please answer the following: 1. What DTC/e-commerce apparel or consumer brands have you done merchandise or inventory planning for, and approximately what revenue scale were they? 2. Describe a situation where a company was repeatedly stocking out of its best-selling products. How did you determine reorder points and quantities? 3. How would you forecast a product selling 20 units/day if paid advertising could potentially increase demand to 35–40 units/day and replenishment lead time is 100 days? 4. How would you determine which products should become continuously replenished evergreen SKUs versus remaining limited-edition products? 5. What data would you request from us during your first week? **Please begin your application with the words "MERCH PLANNING" so we know you read the entire posting.**