“Inventory Planner has given me the power to make data-driven decisions… Now, we always have the right items in the right location in order to maximize sales”
– Tiffany Wight, Warehouse Manager, Knifewear
This kitchen knife brand is using Inventory Planner to save 60+ hours a month, eliminating stockouts and boosting customer service. Read their story:
Knifewear is a multichannel brand that specializes in Japanese kitchen knives and cookware for professional and at-home chefs. Alongside five bricks-and-mortar stores across Canada, Knifewear has a successful Shopify Plus-powered webstore. After experiencing rapid growth, the business struggled to forecast sales and suffered frequent stockouts – then it joined Inventory Planner…
Cutting out stock chaos
Balancing the inventory requirements of both physical and online stores can be a major challenge. It can require several people to manage it (and still result in costly errors) – which is what brought Knifewear to Inventory Planner.
Nathan Gareau, Brand Communications Lead, says: “Our previous software failed to sync properly with our Shopify store, so we couldn’t count on it for a reliable indication of how much stock we had at any given time.
“That meant we’d quite often oversell items. So we might sell a bespoke $2,000 knife to someone, which they’d be really excited about, but we’d then have to let them know that we didn’t actually have it in stock – it would ruin their day, and ours too.
“When we joined Inventory Planner, everything changed for the better – we haven’t had to ruin anyone’s day in ages!!”
Clean-cut solution
Following a speedy onboarding, Inventory Planner has become an invaluable addition to Knifewear’s tech stack, seamlessly syncing with Shopify to provide always up-to-date insight on inventory across every location.
As a top-rated inventory planning app on Shopify, it offers Knifewear accurate sales forecasting which factors in supplier timescales, seasonality and promotions alongside historical sales data. It then translates the forecasts into hassle-free buying recommendations.
It means the team can easily see how much inventory is needed and the best time to order, factoring in supplier lead time and the business’s desired stock cover periods.
“From running a quick report to look closer at a sudden uptick in sales, to being able to see what’s in stock at each of our locations separately, the reporting functionality in Inventory Planner is second-to-none.”
– Tiffany Wight, Warehouse Manager, Knifewear
The team uses Inventory Planner to accurately forecast demand across its five stores and website, make data-driven buying decisions and map its warehouse. With an estimated 64 hours a month saved from manual inventory planning, it is fair to say that Knifewear have greatly sharpened up operations.
Read more about Knifewear’s story, as well as the experiences of our other customers here.