Inventory Strategy & Planning
From demand signal to purchase commitment.
Every decision point where capital is at risk.
Your bestsellers are out of stock and your cash is sitting in the rest.
RiverHouse helps growing consumer brands decide what to buy, how much capital to commit, and when conditions have changed enough to require a new decision.
Which of these is happening in your business?
Cash is tightening even though revenue is growing
The products you need are out of stock; the slow ones keep piling up
Buys get committed without a clear limit on how much is too much
Open-to-buy keeps expanding to protect momentum
The team trusts the forecast, but the actual buy does not match it
Finance, ops, and product are on different timelines
Not sure yet, and that is the problem
If more than two of those landed, the problem is not any one of them. It is how the buy gets decided. That is a structure you can design.
Five places the work usually lands.
Most engagements touch two or three. The diagnostic determines which.
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“We have a forecast. Nobody really believes it, and the buy does not follow it anyway.”
RiverHouse connects the demand signal to the buying decision so the forecast governs the commitment instead of sitting beside it.
Demand planning and forecast architecture
Integrated business planning
Sales and operations planning cadence
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“We keep buying more than we should and we find out too late.”
RiverHouse sets the limits before the money moves, then holds them when growth pressure arrives at the same decision.
Open-to-buy framework design and enforcement
Vendor and commitment governance
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“The assortment keeps growing and nothing ever gets discontinued.”
RiverHouse treats the product line as an economic system rather than a catalog, with thresholds for expanding a category and criteria for exiting one.
Assortment strategy
Portfolio rationalization
New product launch architecture and governance
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“Too much of our money is sitting in product that is not moving.”
RiverHouse finds where capital is stuck, moves it back toward what is working, and sets the targets that keep it from accumulating again.
Working capital target setting and recovery
Procurement execution
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“Amazon, wholesale, and DTC are all pulling from the same pool and nobody is deciding.”
RiverHouse defines the financial role each channel is authorized to play, then enforces the allocation before orders release.
Channel allocation strategy and execution
The person who assesses your buy is the person who has built the function.
RiverHouse is Ray Hurt.
Ray has built formal planning functions where none had existed, four times, across venture-backed brands, a marketplace agency running thirty brands, and national retail. He then led the teams that operated them.
Every engagement is led by Ray.
No junior associates, no handoffs.
A thirty-minute conversation.
No cost, no pitch.
What is happening in your inventory, where capital is committed, and where the pressure is coming from. You do not need clean data for this. Estimates are fine.
RiverHouse works from the reports your team already produces. No system access, no software to buy, and final capital authority stays with your leadership throughout.
Who this is built for.
Consumer product brands where inventory complexity has outpaced the team built to govern it. Typically $5M to $100M in revenue, though revenue is a guide rather than a qualifier. The practical test is whether the buy has outgrown the person holding it: how many channels, how many fulfillment paths, how wide the assortment, how often you reorder.
Probably not the right fit if you want ongoing reporting support, software implemented, or if the buying decision is already owned by someone with the authority and the time to govern it.