Your sales history is not your demand.
SMP Advisors helps DTC and multi-channel brands plan assortments, control inventory and purchase orders to determine the open-to-buy, and build the data systems that monitor and report the rules and exceptions. A merchandise plan is a working tool, not a spreadsheet.
Most plans are built on what sold.
But what sold is the number already shaped by what you ran out of. Plan forward from it and you rebuy last year's stockouts, year after year, and call the result a trend.
Every engagement starts by separating demand from availability — comparing potential against actual on three axes at once: revenue, units, and weeks in stock. The week shortfall explains the unit gap; the unit gap drives the revenue gap. Once those are separated, the size curve, the buy quantity and the receipt flow all get built on demand rather than on the constrained record of it.
Three things, and they connect.
Plan the assortment
Bottom-up unit planning at choice level: potential-based sell-through, growth and safety dials, size curves built on unconstrained demand, and a buy that reconciles to the top-down budget.
Control the buy
Open-to-buy that actually rolls forward: monthly financial plan, weeks of cover, receipt flow and aged-stock diagnostics — tied to the same data the assortment plan runs on.
Build the system
The SQL data model, the stored-procedure pipeline and the Power BI layer underneath it — so the plan refreshes from the source instead of being rebuilt by hand each season.
I don't hand over a deck.
Plenty of consultants will diagnose your planning process. Fewer will build the thing that fixes it and leave it running on your own data, in tools your team already knows how to open.
The deliverable is a working system — a live planning workbook bound to your database, the procedures that feed it, and documentation your team can follow. Excel is the portal. The database is the system of record.
And I don't disappear once it's live. I stay alongside your team through the first cycles, as an extension of it, until you're ready to take the next step on your own.
A typical build includes
- A retail 4-5-4 calendar model that handles the 53-week drift correctly
- Potential-vs-actual diagnostics at SKU, choice and category level
- Size curves stored centrally and versioned, not pasted between files
- A unit plan that seeds itself and still accepts manual override
- Placeholder purchase orders written back to your inventory pipeline
- Power BI reporting reading the same numbers the planner sees
Brands that have outgrown their planning process.
Start-ups building their first real plan, growth brands whose spreadsheets have stopped scaling, and enterprise teams whose ERP reports the past accurately and predicts nothing. What they share is inventory decisions being made on numbers nobody fully trusts.
You don't need a planning department to start. We build what the business needs now, and add to it as you grow — and I'm right there with you at every step.
Don't take my word for it.
Chris Conroy has been invaluable in setting up and maintaining our Merchandise Planning department. His ability to apply discipline and process found in large organizations to Mack Weldon has been a game changer. Having the necessary tools (selling reports, open to buy, etc.) that Chris created provides us with accurate real-time information to help us optimize our inventory levels and maximize our fast growing direct to consumer e-commerce business.
The right blend of analytical skills, combined with an excellent taste level, is what sets him apart from others. All of that said there is no substitute for experience and Chris has plenty of it.
If you are building an e-commerce startup or maintaining a large wholesale apparel business that needs a fresh point of view, I highly recommend Chris for all of your merchandise planning needs.
We brought Chris on as a merchandise planning consultant to help us build our planning function as a growing DTC and wholesale apparel brand, and he was exactly what we needed! He quickly understood our size and growth stage and knew when to go deeper and when to keep things simple.
He brought real depth on the OTB and buy planning and built tools and reporting that made analysis so much easier for our team, turning a heavy lift into something fast and simple.
He was also just great to work with: professional, easygoing, and a great sense of humor that made the spreadsheet heavy days more fun. I’d work with Chris again without question and recommend him to any growing brand that needs solid planning expertise without the overhead of a full-time hire.
Worth a conversation?
Thirty minutes, no pitch. Tell me how you plan today and I'll tell you honestly whether I can help.