Sometime in the last 60 days (or earlier), you made your Q2 inventory bet.

Maybe it was deliberate. A demand model, an OTB, a cross-functional review. Maybe it was a gut call dressed up in a spreadsheet. Either way, the commit window is largely closed. Product is on order or already in transit. The decision is made.

What you don't know yet is whether it was the right one.

The complete insight. Read this and decide if the details are for you or better forwarded to someone on your team.

Most inventory problems don't start at the warehouse. They start at the buying decision, six months earlier, when a founder approved a buy based on a revenue plan they wanted to be true rather than a demand signal they could defend.

The issue isn't that brands buy wrong. It's that they buy without knowing what they're actually basing the decision on. A buy built on last year's Q2 actuals is a different bet than a buy built on current sell-through velocity, active customer counts, and channel-level contribution margin. Both can produce the same number on paper. Only one of them tells you why.

Being late on commit creates pressure to move fast and skip the model. Committing early on a bad assumption creates a cleaner process and a worse outcome. Both paths arrive at the same place: inventory that doesn't match demand, cash that's tied up, and a Q3 that starts in a hole.

The model isn't the point. Knowing what your buy is based on is.

A $12M DTC brand committed their Q2 inventory buy in mid-February, six weeks ahead of schedule. The team felt organized. The buy was sized against Q2 of the prior year, adjusted upward 15% for expected growth. No channel-level breakdown. No sell-through analysis by SKU. No view into which customers from Q4 had reordered and which hadn't.

By mid-May, they were sitting on 11 weeks of inventory on their top three SKUs and running out of their fourth. The fourth SKU had outperformed in Q1 because a wholesale account had picked it up in January. Nobody had updated the demand model. The buy had already shipped.

A $19M brand in the same category committed two weeks later than they wanted to. Supplier pressure was real. But before they signed off, they ran three inputs through their OTB: trailing 90-day sell-through by SKU, channel-level margin contribution, and a simple reorder rate by customer cohort from Q4. The buy came in 8% lighter than their initial instinct suggested. They pushed back on two SKUs entirely.

They finished Q2 with 5 weeks of inventory on hand and cash available to fund a Q3 reorder on the SKU that ran short. Not perfect. Functional.

An inventory buy is a capital allocation decision. The question it needs to answer is not "how much did we sell last year" but "what do we expect to sell, by channel, by SKU, and at what margin, and how much cash do we need tied up to support that."

Three inputs do most of the work:

Sell-through velocity by SKU, trailing 90 days. Last year's Q2 is context. Current sell-through is signal. If a SKU is moving 30% slower than this time last year, buying at last year's volume is a bet that something changes. Know what that bet is before you make it.

Channel-level contribution margin. A unit sold through wholesale at net-60 terms is a different cash event than a unit sold DTC at full price. If your Q2 buy is weighted toward wholesale replenishment, your inventory investment needs to account for the cash timing gap, not just the gross margin.

Q4 customer reorder rate. New customers acquired in Q4 who haven't reordered by late Q1 probably aren't coming back at full price. If your Q2 demand plan assumes they will, the plan is wrong. Pull the cohort data before the buy is signed.

For most brands reading this, the Q2 buy is done. The work now is knowing exactly what assumptions it was built on, so you can monitor the right signals over the next 8 weeks.

If sell-through comes in 20% below the rate your buy assumed, you need to know that by week 6, not week 12. That's the difference between a markdown event you control and a liquidation problem you don't.

Set the tripwires now. What weekly sell-through rate validates your buy? What rate triggers a promotional response? What rate means you have a Q3 cash problem forming?

The buy is in. You can't unwind it. What you can do is stop pretending the assumptions it was built on don't matter anymore. They matter more now than they did when you made them.

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