Plans that survive contact with the season.
SMP Advisors helps retail and wholesale brands plan assortments, control open-to-buy, and build the data systems that make both decisions repeatable — so the plan is a working tool, not a spreadsheet nobody opens after February.
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 the documentation to run it without me. Excel is the portal. The database is the system of record.
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 past the spreadsheet, short of an enterprise system.
Typically $10M–$250M in revenue, planning in Excel, with data trapped in an ERP that reports the past accurately and predicts nothing. Big enough that bad buys hurt, small enough that a six-figure planning platform is not the answer.
Worth a conversation?
Thirty minutes, no pitch. Tell me how you plan today and I'll tell you honestly whether I can help.