Inventory planning is one of those parts of the business that is chronically underinvested in and gets dramatically harder as any consumer brand grows.

Early on, you can get shockingly far with just a simple spreadsheet, some sales history, and a good feel for the business. But add more products, sizes, colors, distribution channels, multiple warehouses, and a growing team making decisions, and figuring out what exactly to buy becomes one of the most consequential parts of running the company.

Buy too little of the right product and you leave revenue on the table. Buy too much of the wrong product and six months later you’re staring at cash sitting in a warehouse, probably waiting for a markdown.

We know this problem because we lived it at Chubbies. More recently, we’ve been hearing it from the operators we work with every day at GoodDay.

As GoodDay has become the operational data foundation for more growing Shopify brands, customers have started asking us a pretty logical question: Can you help us not only manage our inventory, but plan it better?

The answer is yes. And, we think there’s a huge opportunity to do it differently.

Today, we’re launching GoodDay AI Inventory Planning, a custom inventory planning and demand forecasting solution for consumer brands. It combines live inventory, sales, purchase order, shipment and costing data in GoodDay with powerful AI-built infrastructure and is deployed by top tier planning experts to help brands forecast demand, make better buys, and react faster as operating conditions evolve.

We’ve already been building and running these solutions behind the scenes with a number of large, sophisticated brands. Today, we’re excited to open it up more broadly.

Spend less time cleansing data, more time planning

Our goal is simple: your team's hours should go to planning decisions, not data hygiene.

At Chubbies, planning meant pulling together sales data, inventory, open purchase orders, channel commitments, and a pile of assumptions about what was going to happen next. Our team would assemble data, reconcile sources, and check formulas before we could get to the questions that required real judgment: What does demand actually look like? What are we missing because we stocked out? How aggressive should we be on this buy?

The amount of friction we experienced before we could really start planning was unacceptable by every measure.

Then retail would happen. A promotion outperformed. A shipment slipped. A product took off. Another one didn't. And the picture had to be rebuilt again.

That's the nature of planning. No model perfectly predicts what happens next. The job of a great planning team is to make smart inventory bets with the best information available, and to recognize quickly when reality is moving away from the plan.

Those bets are where your cash goes. Every purchase order is a decision about what your customers will want months from now. Make better decisions and you keep more winners in stock, protect margin, and grow without tying up unnecessary cash. Get them wrong often enough and even a fast-growing brand ends up with working capital stuck in the wrong inventory.

What if the planning system started with your business?

At GoodDay, one thing has become obvious: there’s no universal way great brands plan inventory. Yet most planning software starts with a rigid methodology and asks the operator to adapt to it. 

One team plans off recent average weekly sales, because the last eight weeks tell them more than last year did. Another part of the same team plans based on year-over-year growth, category by category. Another needs to place a bet on a trend that has almost no history behind it and size it anyway. And most of them need to do all three at once, in different parts of the assortment, in the same buy period. 

We think that can work the other way around.

We’ve brought Megan Topliff, who we worked with at Chubbies and has spent more than two decades planning for growing apparel and accessories brands, into GoodDay to lead this work. She described the problem better than I can:

“The thing that always got me about planning is how little of it is actually planning. You spend the week pulling exports, reconciling three sources, and checking whether the number in front of you is even current. Then, you get maybe an hour of real judgment at the end, which is the part you’re actually good at. I wanted to flip that ratio.”

That idea, flipping the ratio, is a big part of what we’re building.

GoodDay already brings together the operating data the plan depends on: inventory, open POs, costs, wholesale sales orders, and all other sales across all channels. It’s comprehensive by nature. Instead of spending most of the planning cycle assembling and validating that picture, the team can start with current data and get much faster to the work that actually requires their expertise.

Then, we build the planning solution around the brand, not the other way around. As Megan puts it, the hard part is understanding “how that team really buys...Style or SKU-based, top down or bottom up. Not whatever the software decided planning should look like for them.”

Our planning team works with your operators to understand your assortment, channels, buying calendar, financial targets, and planning methodology. We use that to build a brand-specific solution on top of your live GoodDay data, using modern AI models and tools to automate more of the analysis, build out GoodDay AI Signals to surface risks and opportunities, and help your team focus on the decisions that deserve their judgment.

Then, we deploy it, train your team, and work alongside you through your first buying cycles to make sure that you are finding high efficacy.

That combination is what we’re really excited about: live operating data, a planning system built around your business, experienced planning judgment, and AI that makes all of it more useful and accurate.

We're not the only ones who see it that way. Ovadia Labaton, co-founder of The Perfect Jean, one of the brands we've been building with, put it like this:

"I wanted a buying process that responds to what's actually happening in the business rather than a number we set once and defend all year. Flexing the targets, accounting for the demand we missed on stockouts, keeping our delivery dates and order minimums intact. Megan understood all of that in the first conversation, including the parts that are specific to us, and that's not something you get from software alone. The key to inventory, merchandising and buying is risk management, cash management, and performance management. GoodDay’s AI Inventory Planning is helping us find the intersection of the three."

Flip the ratio: more planning, less preparing to plan

A great planner should be spending more time doing the work they’re great at: interpreting demand, weighing risks, challenging assumptions, and deciding where the next dollar of inventory should go.

GoodDay AI Inventory Planning is built to give them more time to do exactly that.

We’re already seeing what that can look like. One omnichannel apparel brand came to GoodDay planning more than 8,600 SKUs through a workbook with dozens of tabs. A missed-demand analysis could take two days. With its planning solution running on live GoodDay data, that analysis can now happen in minutes and the team’s full weekly planning cycle takes about five hours.

That’s what we mean by flipping the ratio.

Forecasts use sales history, trends, and seasonality, and they correct for the demand you never got to see. A bestseller that sold out is still a bestseller, but your own sales history stops telling you that the moment you run out.The system brings demand, current inventory, incoming POs, and commitments together to generate buy recommendations and surface potential shortfalls, excess inventory, expedite opportunities, and orders that may need to move.

For new products, teams can use comparable styles to create a starting point. Promotions and launches can be incorporated into the plan. Brands managing raw materials can account for components like fabric, yarn, and blanks alongside finished goods.

Most importantly, your team can see where the numbers came from.

We don’t believe AI should turn inventory planning into a black box, and we definitely don’t think it should replace the judgment of a great brand operator. The opportunity is to use AI to take more of the mechanical work out of planning, provide ephemeral user experiences and give great planners more time for the work that actually requires their judgment.

The system recommends. The operator makes the call.

For the business, the opportunity is bigger than saving a planner a few hours. Better planning means having more of your winners available when customers want them, putting fewer dollars into inventory you don’t need, reacting faster when demand changes, and giving your team more confidence about where to place the next inventory dollar.

From knowing what happened to deciding what happens next

When we started GoodDay, we set out to build the operating foundation we wished we’d had while running brands ourselves: one reliable place to manage inventory, purchasing, costs, and increasingly complex multi-channel operations.

Planning feels like a very natural next step.

If GoodDay understands what you have, what you’ve sold, what you’ve ordered, what it costs, and what is already committed, we can start helping with a much more valuable question: What should you do next?

That gets to something bigger we’re excited about at GoodDay.

For a long time, business software has been very good at recording what happened and giving operators more dashboards to look at. We think the next generation of operating software can understand the context of the business, help identify what needs attention, and take more of the manual work out of getting from information to action.

Inventory planning is a particularly exciting place to do that because the decisions are so consequential.

We also believe strongly in our growing ecosystem and will continue to build with the best partners. If your team already has a planning platform or process it loves, GoodDay can help you power that too, whether through integrations with planning partners, GoodDay Sheets, or our API directly. Our goal is to give operators the best possible data foundation and help them plan in the way that works for their business, not dictate how they should be planning.

We’re just getting started

Inventory planning was one of the hardest parts of building Chubbies. We made some great buys. We made some bad ones. And we learned firsthand how quickly an inventory decision you make today can show up six months later in revenue, margin, and cash.

That experience is a big part of why I’m so excited about what we’re building now.

We didn’t decide to tackle planning because the world needed another planning app. We got pulled here by operators dealing with a problem we know well, and we realized GoodDay has a pretty unique opportunity to help solve it.

Our solution is built on a foundation of live operating data in GoodDay, we can quickly develop an entirely unique planning system around your brand and pair it with experienced planners who will help you understand how best to harness this generation of AI tools that just showed up on our doorstep.

Most importantly, we can keep making the system better alongside the operators using it.

That feels like a much better way to plan inventory.

On September 29, Megan and I will also walk through what we’ve built and talk about how great operators are approaching inventory planning today. Register for the webinar here.

Let’s build, we’re excited to get this into the hands of more brands!