Profit-boosting Inventory Planning Solution For Beauty Brands

Buy The Right Inventory to Make a Pretty Profit

As a beauty brand In the current market, it’s vital you stay up to speed with which items drive most profit, as well as less popular products that can drain your cash flow.

But beauty trends can change (literally) overnight, so you need to plan your inventory based on up-to-date insights.

Inventory Planner makes it easy.

It offers intelligent demand forecasting that factors in your latest sales trends and translates it into reliable buying recommendations that will boost your profit.

Top features for beauty brands

Forecast accurately, buy confidently

Knowing exactly what your customers want is essential for getting your inventory right. Inventory Planner constantly analyzes your selling patterns and adjusts your demand forecasts accordingly. Then it tells you what you need to buy to boost your profits or sales, and when to buy it to meet forecasted demand.It means you can spend your capital on your real bestsellers, not outdated ones.

Act on excess inventory fast

Inventory Planner flags up any items that aren’t selling in line with customer demand including overweight ‘safety stock’. It offers key insights like overstocked costs, last sold date and overstocked units, so you can act on your biggest cash-drainers first before they lose their appeal and hit your cash flow.

Easy bundle and assembly inventory planning

Knowing how much of each component you need and when to order to create the right amount of beauty products can be mind-boggling. Inventory Planner is built to automate inventory forecasting and planning for assemblies as well as bundles. It breaks down forecasts and buying recommendations to component level, so you always have everything you need available (and don’t risk messing up your cash flow).

Shorter purchasing cycle, healthier cash flow

Purchasing months (or even years) in advance reduces the risk of stockouts, but it’s a burden on your cash flow. With Inventory Planner, you can shorten your purchasing cycle while still keeping stockout risk low (and releasing much-needed cash). How? Use ideal ‘stock cover days’ that can be adjusted at any level (such as SKU or supplier) to align your purchasing frequency with each item’s supply patterns.

Buy new items with confidence

Does investing in a new wonder cream or an eco-friendly hair dryer feel like a gamble? Inventory Planner eliminates the guesswork by allowing you to ‘borrow’ sales data from similar products as a reference to predict future demand for new products. You’ll get buying recommendations for every variant (including size, color, pattern), so you can invest with confidence.

Customized for retail and wholesale

Wholesale and retail beauty and skincare products sell at different paces and quantities, so they need a different approach. Inventory Planner separates retail and wholesale goods and uses separate forecasting models, so you get buying recommendations that you can rely on (and you never overstock or run out of stock again!).

SKU-level actionable inventory insights

Inventory Planner translates your inventory and sales performance data into 200+ metrics for all your products that allow you to make truly revenue or profit-driven decisions without feeling overwhelmed by data. In addition, Inventory Planner pulls core metrics from Google Analytics to take your reporting to the next level. Easily assess a product’s page views with its sales performance to understand if it should be merchandised differently on your webstore to drive more sales.

Automated multi-warehouse inventory planning

Multiple sales channels plus multiple warehouses can equal multiple headaches. Not with Inventory Planner. It forecasts customer demand for each of your inventory locations including your own warehouses, brick and mortar stores, Amazon FBA and 3PLs. Based on forecasted demand, it offers reliable inventory buying recommendations including warehouse transfer insights to help you balance inventory across locations before ordering new stock.

Easily plan purchasing budgets

Inventory Planner’s Open-to-Buy (OTB) feature lets you plan your buying budgets by month or retail weeks to meet your goals, based on your core metrics such as previous years’ revenue, expected margins and even the exact number of units you need to order based on retail price.

"As a tool, it’s super flexible and can be finely tuned so that it factors in seasonality, trends, promotions and market shifts. It means we can glance at the data and instantly say ‘ok, we need to order 100,000 of that item, not 10,000 – otherwise we’re going to run out in two months"

Trevor Martin, Vice President Operations at Snow

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 beauty and health products 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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