Your inventory problem started before the product arrived.
RiverHouse runs the buy for scaling consumer brands, sized against what your capital can carry.
At some point, the buy outgrows the person holding it.
Most growing brands run the buy the way they always have. The founder holds it, or a lead holds it alongside everything else. It works until the business changes shape.
A channel gets added. The assortment widens. Reorder cadence tightens from seasonal to weekly. Now the same decision carries more margin assumptions, more lead times, and more channel promises than one person can hold while also running the company.
The buy still gets committed. It just gets committed under strain, and the cost shows up later as slow turns, cash trapped in the wrong SKUs, and a book that is harder to defend than the balance sheet suggests.
That is not a discipline problem. It is a structural one, and structure is something you design.
Inventory is built, not automated.
The buy is the largest capital decision a growing brand makes, committed months before the demand that justifies it. Three functions want something from it, and one of them has to fund all of it.
Commercial owns the demand story and the assortment.
Sales carries the commitments across DTC, wholesale, and marketplaces.
Operations holds lead times, capacity, and warehouse flow.
Finance sets what the balance sheet can actually carry.
Each is right inside its own view. None is the whole picture. Someone has to reconcile all four into one committed number, at SKU, months ahead of the demand that proves it right or wrong, and against a balance sheet that does not care how good the plan sounded.
That reconciliation is the architecture. A structure designed against real constraints, the way an architect designs a building against load and use rather than letting it assemble itself.
Get it right and the inventory is a downstream effect of the decision. Get it wrong and the inventory becomes the problem you spend the year managing.
It is also the part that cannot be automated. Auto-replenishment optimizes inside one function. An algorithm reorders what sold last week. Neither one reconciles commercial against sales against operations against what the business can fund, because that reconciliation is a judgment, not a calculation.
That judgment is the work RiverHouse does.
Every engagement begins with a conversation.
Work is scoped to what the business needs.
RiverHouse works from the data and reports your team already produces.
No system access.
No software to buy.
No implementation project.
The work happens inside your existing planning environment and operating cadence, and final capital authority stays with your leadership at all times.
Every engagement starts with a diagnostic conversation to understand the structural condition of the business. From there the work proceeds at the depth required.
Every engagement starts with a diagnostic conversation to understand the structural condition of the business.
From there the work proceeds at the depth required.
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5 to 7 days | $4,000
A point-in-time read on where the buy is productive, where it is trapped, and where it is at risk.
Fixed scope, fixed fee, no full audit. If the work continues to a Structural Performance Audit within 30 days, the fee applies in full toward it.
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21 days | Scoped to complexity
Defines where capital is leaking and where commitment governance has fallen behind.
Output is a stabilization blueprint:
documented thresholds, a forward commitment risk map, and a prioritized 30/60/90 corrective sequence.If your team can hold the thresholds once they are defined, no further work is required. If the capability is not there yet, an Infrastructure Build or an embedded seat is the better path.
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60 to 90 days | Scoped to complexity
Installs the operating structure the buy runs on:
demand forecast, open-to-buy framework, commitment gates, and a decision review cadence the team actually uses.Thresholds get defined and installed, then run under real conditions with RiverHouse present at every decision point until they hold.
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Ongoing | Scoped to complexity
Senior ownership of the planning and buying seat. Governs the buy. Builds your team's capability. Steps down as the discipline holds.
Senior authority in every session.
No handoffs.
RiverHouse is Ray Hurt.
He has built the formal planning function where none had existed, four times, across venture-backed brands, a marketplace agency running thirty brands, and national retail. He has also led the teams that operated those functions after they were built.
His work spans strategy, sales planning, product line management, and pre-line: setting the assortment and the plan before anything is committed. It includes open-to-buy design and enforcement, demand forecasting, inventory management, and the consensus process that turns a forecast into an authorized buy.
He has owned sales, margin, and inventory plans across DTC, marketplace, wholesale, and retail, from $15M growth brands to portfolios above $300M.
That experience matters because the work does not end with the recommendation.
Whoever reads your position has to understand the evidence behind the commitment, set the thresholds that matter, and be able to hold them when growth pressure, sales pressure, and capital pressure arrive at the same decision. Where the engagement continues into the buying rhythm, that is the same person.
That responsibility does not get handed off.
Seven signals your buy is trapping capital
A short diagnostic you can run against your own book. No call required.
When inventory is the exposure you need to see.
For PE operating partners, private credit, and asset-based lenders with consumer-brand exposure, the same architecture answers a different question. What is the inventory actually worth against forward demand, where is capital trapped, and how does the position hold up at a capital event.
RiverHouse provides inventory due diligence, capital-exposure reviews, and post-acquisition operating structure for portfolio companies where inventory is the largest ungoverned use of capital.
If the buy has outgrown the person holding it, let's have a conversation.
