Inventory Depleted Early

A story about how Paul Tran's company faced a major inventory crisis during their scaling phase.

"We had projected inventory for the entire Q1. We bought it, had it in stock - it was November and we thought we were good. We bought so much inventory we thought we were covered until April. That's how much inventory we had.

By December 16th, we sold out. All inventory gone. We were like 'oh crap.' It was crazy - everyone and our families were in the warehouse packing new inventory to send out.

We ended up shipping late to our customers, which means they weren't happy with us. That was definitely a failure for us because we want to delight our customers all the time. And this didn't go away - it happened all the time when scaling. We could never predict when Howard Stern would do a read or influencers would launch their videos. Things would just pop.

It became really difficult to manage all the channels because we're omnichannel - we're not just subscription or B2C. We've got Amazon, D2C, international, and retail. Working with retail partners is a different beast - you're planning a year in advance at all times."