Wild & Stone Says Inventory Planner is its ‘Secret Sauce’ for Efficient Growth

“Inventory Planner is our secret sauce. I kind of don’t want other people – especially our competitors – to know how good it is.” – Warren Jonas, Co-founder, Wild & Stone

When a start-up takes off, it can take off fast.

Just look at Wild & Stone.

One minute, it was the seed of an idea in the minds of husband-and-wife founders Kat and Warren. The next minute, it’s become a multi-channel global brand with a multi-million dollar revenue.

“Kat was brushing our daughter’s teeth with a plastic toothbrush one night when she realised she was contributing to the plastic pollution that’s harming our planet,” says Co-founder Warren Jonas.

“She wanted to do something to make a difference. Within weeks, she created a brilliant prototype of a bamboo toothbrush.

“We launched on Amazon in 2018 and decided to see what happened. Within weeks, we were selling £10K of toothbrushes a month. It’s been madness ever since.”

A wild success

Fast forward a few years, Wild & Stone now has a range of plastic-free, eco-friendly homeware – including textiles, toilet brushes and hair ties, as well as its original toothbrushes.

With 110 SKUs, it operates thriving webstores for the US, UK and Europe, four warehouses and sells wholesale, as well as on marketplaces including Amazon and Etsy.

However, behind the scenes of Wild & Stone’s rapid success, an inventory storm was brewing.

Reliant on only an Excel spreadsheet to forecast demand, Wild & Stone faced mounting complexity as they expanded into new regions and product lines.

Warren explains: “We were using Excel to do inventory planning, and as soon as it got more than one region and three products, it was almost impossible to make it accurate.” This often led to frequent stockouts, hampering their ability to meet demand.

Warren adds: “Excel was OK until we expanded to more than one region and a handful of products – then it became impossible to forecast accurately.

“We try to sea ship everything because it’s more sustainable than flying, but it takes six to eight weeks and makes planning complicated.

“We’d launch a new product and it would take off and we’d run out of stock. It would be weeks and weeks until more arrived.

“It got to the point where we were spending loads of money on marketing to make a product sell really well but then we’d run out and it would disappear for six weeks. It was crazy.

“We’d be doing all the hard work to get to the top of marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy and Google shopping and then we’d run out of stock and lose sales velocity and another company would fill the void.

“So we’d lose the sale and have wasted our marketing investment.

“The reality is every time you run out of stock, you’re giving your competitors an advantage. Unfortunately, we were doing it all the time.”

Taming complexity

Desperate to implement a ‘proper’ forecasting and buying solution, the team looked at multiple options but settled on Inventory Planner by Sage as the best scalable solution.

As a top-rated inventory planning app, Inventory Planner reveals which inventory to order, how much to order, and the perfect moment to order it, based on an accurate calculation of how much a merchant will sell.

Its accurate forecasting factors in supplier timescales, seasonality and promotions alongside historical sales data. It then translates the forecasts into hassle-free buying recommendations and offers powerful reports that can be fully customized.

The app integrates seamlessly with all leading e-commerce platforms, tools and ERPs – another advantage compared to other solutions.

Warren says: “Inventory Planner stood out because it was really well priced for what we required and it had all the native integrations to Shopify, Amazon, Etsy and all the other tools in our tech stack.

“It pulls all the data into one place and has reports that are automatically always up to date and visually very easy to understand.

“It offers more than a basic start-up needs, but you can grow into it. It has scaled with us – every time we’ve added a new region or a new warehouse it adapts without issue, which adds a lot of value for me.”

With Inventory Planner by Sage at the heart of its operations, complexity has been transformed into efficiency at Wild & Stone.

Thanks to the tool’s unlimited seats, the whole team can benefit from access to accurate forecasting data and reliable purchasing recommendations.

This has put a stop to time being wasted in clunky spreadsheets and enabled marketing spend to be synced with inventory planning, maximizing profits.

Warren estimates: “It’s like having three extra people in the business. We couldn’t do what we’re doing without it.” Beyond saving time and labor, Inventory Planner also helps balance stock levels. “It prevents us from overstocking as well as understocking — which is just as dangerous.”

He says: “It would be impossible to manually replicate what Inventory Planner does for us. It would be absolute chaos without it. We’d need to hire at least three full time people just to deal with the complexity.

“Thanks to Inventory Planner, we’re about 100 times more efficient than we were. We see it as a big play in giving us a competitive edge.”

Turning waste into wins

Inventory Planner’s range of easy-to-understand inventory reports includes a powerful overstock report which highlights overstocked items and the associated cost, so merchants can quickly see which items to liquidate first to protect cash flow.

It even flags up both slow-moving and hot-selling items – and retailers have the flexibility to create a huge range of custom reports based on more than 200 metrics.

These customized reports have proven to be one of the most loved features at Wild & Stone, along with the time-saving automated PO creation and simple warehouse transfers.

Warren says: “One of my favourite features is being able to create purchase orders from our buying reports and place them with suppliers. We can then track all orders and plan warehouse transfers. It’s game-changing.

“I really like the proactive notifications about overstock or stockouts, too. If sales for a particular item suddenly spike out of the blue, it alerts us to buy more stock. And if we’ve got too much of something – usually because the minimum order quantity was 5,000 units – then it flags that an item is overstocked and we should do something about it.

“That’s useful because we don’t want 100 boxes sitting in the warehouse when we pay per month to store it. That’s really dangerous.

“It also flags when we can transfer stock from another region instead of placing a new order. We have custom reports set up to alert us when any of our warehouses have less than 30 days of stock in. It means when that happens we can take our marketing efforts down a notch until stock is back. That level of sophistication is fantastic!

“I also love that we can plan based on the requirements of our warehouses – sometimes they’ll only let us store 30, 60 or 90 days of stock and Inventory Planner allows us to adjust our orders on that basis.”

Scaling the smart way

“We have over 100 products manufactured in four locations and shipped to over five sites. Inventory Planner is crucial to our operations. Without it, we would be lost.” – Warren Jonas, Co-founder, Wild & Stone

As a market-leading inventory planning tool, Inventory Planner combines slick automation functionality with advanced features like Open-to-Buy (OTB) planning. This helps larger retailers calculate how much inventory to buy, ensuring healthy cash flow and stability during long supplier lead times.

Thanks to these features, Inventory Planner has become an essential partner in helping Wild & Stone scale efficiently while staying ahead in a competitive market.

Warrens adds: “When marketing, logistics, and manufacturing costs rise, you have to maximize efficiency to boost net profit. That means using tools to automate marketing, shipping, and inventory planning – otherwise, these processes will drain time and money, making it impossible to scale.

“Inventory Planner is our secret sauce. I kind of don’t want other people – especially our competitors – to know how good it is.

“It’s certainly a big part of our long-term growth plan.”

Want to follow in Wild & Stone’s footsteps? Book a tailored Inventory Planner demo now.