An 8-figure apparel brand reached out this week.
3,000+ SKUs. Growing 20% year on year. Inventory sitting at 2x where it should be.
Here's what they told me:
Reorder logic lives in one person's head.
Nothing is documented.
The business is exposed if that person is unavailable.
Hundreds of dead and slow-moving SKUs clogging the warehouse.
Cash locked up in units that stopped moving months ago.
No automated reporting. Everything pulled by hand. No reliable read on how collections are performing week to week.
Storewide promotions running without a clear view of which products actually need a markdown and which ones are being discounted unnecessarily.
This is what inventory looks like when growth outpaces the planning function.
Revenue is growing. The inventory system underneath it hasn't kept up.
The SKUs multiplied. The range sprawled. The reorder logic never got documented. The reporting never got automated.
And now the warehouse is full of the wrong things while the right things are running out.
Growth doesn't fix inventory problems...It exposes them.
The brands that scale cleanly are the ones that built the inventory intelligence layer before the complexity arrived...not after.
How far has your growth outpaced your inventory planning function?