SMP Advisors is Chris Conroy.
A merchandise planning practice that builds the systems as well as the plans — founded in 2013 and working with retail and wholesale brands out of New York.
What SMP stands for
Strategic Merchandise Planning. It's the discipline the business was built around: deciding what to buy, how much of it, in what sizes, arriving when — and being able to defend every one of those numbers.
How I got here
Two or three paragraphs. What's most persuasive here is specifics: the categories you've planned, the size of the businesses, the systems you've worked in, and the moment you realised the planning tools were the bottleneck. Prospects are deciding whether you've done their job before — so name the job. Do not include a street address.
TODO: replace this paragraph. Something like — I spent [X] years planning [categories] for [type of business], where I learned that the constraint was rarely the merchant's judgement and almost always the data they were asked to judge on.
Why I build the systems too
Most planning consultants stop at the recommendation. That was never enough in my own work: the recommendation was only as good as the numbers behind it, and the numbers were usually assembled by hand from an ERP that had never been asked to answer the question.
So the practice covers both ends. I'll tell you what your history says about next season, and I'll build the thing that keeps telling you — on your data, in your tools, owned by you.
What I believe about planning.
Potential before actual. What sold is capped by what was in stock. Any process that treats sales history as demand history will rebuy the same stockouts indefinitely.
The merchant is not the enemy of the model. Seeded numbers are a starting position, not a verdict. Every one of them should be typeable-over, and the typed number should win without a fight.
One number, many views. If the planner's workbook and the executive's dashboard disagree, both get ignored and the business goes back to instinct. They should read from the same source.
Handover is part of the build. An engagement that leaves you dependent on the consultant has failed, however good the model is.
Let's talk about your season.
Thirty minutes, no pitch, and an honest answer about whether I'm the right fit.