Over the past year, I’ve spoken with planners, buyers, merchants, supply chain leaders, and CFOs across retail. Different categories, different roles but one shared sentiment keeps coming up:
Inventory just doesn’t feel right.
Take #fashion. Long lead times make it incredibly hard to respond to fast-changing trends. By the time brands understand what’s selling or tariffs shift, the economy changes, or consumer sentiment swings they’re often left with either far too much inventory or not enough. Fast fashion tries to solve this by moving faster, but predicting what will actually sell is still a gamble. In many cases, it’s educated guesswork at best.
In #health, #beauty, and #specialty retail, the pain shows up differently. Many brands carry excess inventory as a hedge, hoping for a viral moment or protecting against supply chain disruptions and tariff risk. One nutrition brand told me they keep five months of safety stock, just in case a TikTok spike suddenly hits.
Across categories, one pattern is impossible to ignore: #planning still happens in spreadsheets. Even brands running on #NetSuite or similar systems export data into #Excel, make decisions there, and push it back, using their #ERP more like a storage system than a planning engine. Spreadsheets work until complexity kicks in. Then teams fall back on gut instinct. It’s slow, error-prone, and doesn’t scale.
So what are teams actually asking for:
1️⃣ Adaptive demand planning that evolves as the business grows: new channels, new fulfillment nodes, wholesale, and beyond.
2️⃣ Scenario planning that reflects real-world messiness: tariffs, lead-time shocks, demand surges and clearly shows trade-offs
3️⃣ Network-wide inventory visibility and optimization, so decisions aren’t made in silos
#AI absolutely belongs in this conversation but not as a black box. The real opportunity is building adaptive planning systems that automate the busywork, respond as conditions change, and give teams clear, transparent insight into what’s at stake.
That’s the direction we’re building toward at OnePint.ai, and it’s been encouraging to see how strongly this resonates in conversations so far.
If you’re heading to #NRF, Anshuman Jaiswal & I’d love to continue the discussion, grab a coffee or chat for 15 minutes to compare notes on what’s actually working (and what isn’t).