Trusted Inventory Planning Solution For Apparel and Fashion Brands

Keep Your Inventory On Trend, Even When Fashions Change

Influencer culture means fashion trends are moving faster than ever – and if your brand can’t keep up, it will quickly go out of style.

You need the power to switch up your inventory to meet rapidly-changing demand – otherwise you risk missing sales opportunities or tying up your cash in items that are already out of fashion.

Enter Inventory Planner. It intelligently predicts demand and offers buying recommendations you can count on, even when trends change overnight.

Features for fashion retailers

Fashion-focused demand forecasting

Not all fashion and apparel goods sell in the same way. Seasonal, non-seasonal, fast-fashion, slow-fashion, retail and wholesale products each need a different forecasting approach for optimized accuracy. Inventory Planner offers forecasting models that work for all your products, so you always know the exact inventory you need to meet demand.

SKU-level inventory planning

If you have a large catalog that includes variants for each item, such as cut, size, color and fabric, it can be extremely challenging to work out how much of each variant to order and when to order it. Inventory Planner makes it simple. It offers reliable purchasing recommendations at variant level, saving you hours on tedious, error-prone calculations.

Shorter purchasing cycle, less safety stock, healthier cash flow

Do you plan your purchasing months (or even years) in advance to avoid the risk of stockouts? With Inventory Planner, you can shorten your purchasing cycle while still keeping stockout risk low (and releasing much-needed cash). How? Shorten your ideal ‘stock cover days’ on fast-supplying items, while keeping some margin on items that are having supply shortages.

Buy new styles with confidence

Does investing in new products feel like a gamble? Inventory Planner’s Assortment Report eliminates the guesswork by allowing you to ‘borrow’ sales data from similar products. At a glance, you’ll see predicted demand for your new products and buying recommendations for every variant, including size, color and pattern.

Plan your purchasing budgets

Inventory Planner’s Open-to-Buy (OTB) feature lets you plan your buying budgets by month or retail weeks. Plan at the level that works for you – according to SKU, category or by your custom product tags. Plan your budgets based on metrics like your previous years’ revenue, expected margins or even the exact number of units you need to order based on retail price.

Optimize merchandising to boost sales

Inventory Planner translates all your inventory and sales data into 200+ meaningful metrics to help you easily identify your bestsellers, cash drainers and periodic trends. Plus, integrating with Google Analytics, Inventory Planner offers you combined marketing and inventory metrics to help better merchandise the products in your online stores.

Forecast for multiple inventory locations

Inventory Planner tells you how much inventory is needed and when to order it to meet demand for each of your locations including your own warehouses, brick and mortar stores, Amazon FBA and 3PLs. Plus, it offers smart warehouse transfer insights to help you balance inventory across locations before ordering new stock.

Optimize your shelf space and shipping

Inventory Planner includes intuitive features to help you optimize your logistics. Factor your shelf space capacity in every warehouse into your buying recommendations. Scale your purchase orders to max out the space or weight available in containers, reducing the unit shipping cost of each item.

Bundling and assembling made simple

Bundling and assembling can add mind-boggling complexity to your forecasting and inventory planning if done manually – but Inventory Planner is built to automate it. Always know how much inventory you need of each component and when to place the order to make sure you have the bundle or assembled products available when your customers want to buy.

"Inventory Planner has a huge part to play in that. With the insights and accuracy we receive across each individual item, we can keep making our inventory profitability better and better."

Mike Hodgen, Co-Founder at Freedom Rave Wear

"Before, I was hesitant buying new stock, but now I know when I have enough, and that knowledge is extremely valuable. Having Inventory Planner behind us means that for the first time in my 20 year history, I have the confidence to scale."

Danielle Malconian, CEO at Vikki Vi and Plus By Design

"Inventory Planner was a game changer from the word go. It analyzes your data and gives you a reliable breakdown of exactly how much inventory we should manufacture and when to avoid running out or having too much stock."

Jessica Brooks, CEO at J Brooks Boutique

Get your customer demand forecasts and inventory buying recommendations

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Faq

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Who is Inventory Planner for?

Inventory Planner is the market-leading inventory planning software that is designed to help retailers, e-commerce brands, wholesalers and manufacturing merchants to make data-driven, profit-boosting inventory purchasing decisions based on reliable customer demand predictions, with different supply patterns factored in.

We support 2,600+ worldwide brands from startups to billion-dollar companies in every industry imaginable – from apparel and fashion to FMCG.

If your business holds inventory in your own warehouses, brick and mortar stores, or if you use Amazon FBA or 3PLs, and you want to reduce your excess inventory or safety stock ratio while keeping stockout risk low, Inventory Planner is for you.

2. Do I still need Inventory Planner if I already have an Inventory Management System (IMS)?

Short answer: yes! Longer answer: Inventory Management Systems are useful for tracking goods, but they don’t help you forecast demand and plan your inventory purchasing, especially when market trends are rapidly changing and consumer demand is unpredictable. Inventory Planner does.

In a nutshell, if you’re using an IMS, but still experiencing out of stock or excess stock issues, you should try Inventory Planner.

To learn more about the difference between an IMS and Inventory Planner, and pick the right system for your business, take a look at this guide.

3. Should I book a demo or start a 14-day free trial?

A virtual demo with one of our pros is the best and fastest way to see exactly how Inventory Planner will work specifically for your businesses, without needing to connect and configure your data yourself.

However, we understand you might prefer to dive straight in and explore for yourself (especially if you’re a demand forecasting or inventory planning specialist) so we also offer a 14-day free trial.

4. How is Inventory Planner different from other providers?

We’re proud to stand out from the crowd in a number of ways, including…

We’re true leaders in our field: Unlike generic inventory softwares, Inventory Planner is a market-leading specialized solution. We started back in 2012 (when inventory planning wasn’t even a ‘thing’!) and we’ve spent more than a decade fine-tuning our forecasting and inventory planning models so they get results, even in turbulent times.
Our forecasting is transparent and customizable: We believe you can only make informed decisions when you fully understand your data. With Inventory Planner, you’ll know exactly how your forecasting has been calculated (and you can tweak it to suit your needs), so you can take our forecasts and purchasing recommendations and use them to help you meet your goals.
We’re always evolving, just like the retail market: As part of Sage Group, we’re able to invest heavily and regularly in our innovation, so we’re always a step ahead of our competition when it comes to offering reliable forecasting and intelligent purchasing recommendations, even as markets shift.

5. Is it easy for me to implement and configure Inventory Planner on my own?

There are two options:

Implement and learn the system on your own
Inventory Planner is built to be intuitive, so you can self-implement the system and configure your forecasting strategies if you have experience with forecasting softwares and the bandwidth available.
Faster onboarding, led by us (RECOMMENDED)
If you’re looking for optimal time-to-value, we recommend our guided onboarding, led by us. This is the faster and hassle-free way to get set up for success. Our forecasting pros will get you and your team up and running on Inventory Planner quickly (on average within 30 days), including system integrations, data migration, bespoke forecasting strategy configurations, tests and intuitive training. It’s the best way to ensure you get the most from Inventory Planner.

6. What's the SKU limit with Inventory Planner?

Inventory Planner is a scalable solution built to work for businesses of any size, from startups to billion-dollar companies – so there is no SKU limit.

Plus, with our Data Warehouse Connectors, data from any source can be seamlessly synced with Inventory Planner (which means no siloed data or delayed syncs for businesses with large data sets across various platforms).

It starts with your data

Your inventory and sales data is the foundation on which our accurate forecasting and inventory planning is built on. That’s why we’ve made it easy to seamlessly and securely add it to Inventory Planner.

No matter where you store your data (whether it's your online stores, inventory and order management systems, warehouse management systems, or ERP, EDI, accounting tools and spreadsheets); we’ll get you connected so that you get forecasting and inventory buying recommendations that are accurate, reliable and always up-to-date.

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