Every buy you place is a seven-figure guess.
I'm Peng Huang. I build the planning function founder-led brands are missing — from open-to-buy to markdowns. It starts with a three-week Inventory Health Check.
$8,500, fixed fee. If it doesn't identify at least $25,500 of trapped inventory cash — three times the fee — you don't pay.
You're great at product. The buys are another story.
Nobody on the team has ever built an open-to-buy. That's not a flaw in your team — it's a missing function.
- Your core best sellers — the ones carrying your margin — are out of stock again.Full-price sales, gone
- The warehouse is full of seasonal product that was supposed to sell through.Trapped cash
- Buy quantities get decided in a spreadsheet, late, mostly on instinct.A seven-figure guess
- Every markdown email is margin you already paid for, walking out the door.Margin given away
- You can't answer "how much should we buy?" without a knot in your stomach.No system to answer it
What that work has been worth.
Eighteen years of it — built from scratch at direct-to-consumer startups, run at scale inside fashion houses.
Cleared by overlaying finance's own depreciation schedule, so the dead stock identified itself.
A replenishment model that ended chronic stockouts on the styles carrying the margin — at full price.
The same decisions, with the strategy built into a tool the team runs itself.
Start with an Inventory Health Check.
Inventory Health Check
Three weeks. Every style gets a verdict, and you see exactly where your cash is trapped.
What you get
- Every style sorted into chase, double down, investigate, or exit
- The dollar value of cash tied up in slow and aged inventory
- What your markdowns are costing you, and where they're wasted
- A map of which parts of your planning function are missing
- A one-page action plan, walked through with you and your buyer
How it works
- Week 1You send sales, on-hand, and on-order data from Shopify or your ERP. I interview you and whoever currently runs buying and planning — markdown cadence, promotions, traffic — so I know how the business actually runs.
- Week 2I run the analysis, and come back with questions wherever the numbers need context.
- Week 3We walk through what I found and what to do about it.
The guarantee: if I don't identify at least $25,500 in trapped inventory cash — three times the fee — you don't pay. Trapped cash means inventory at cost carrying more than six months of supply, or aged past 180 days.
What you get back: a verdict on every style.
This is the core of the report. Your whole assortment sorted on the two axes that decide everything — how fast it's selling, and how much of it you're holding — with one action attached to each box. No maybes, no "keep an eye on it."
Then I build the whole planning function.
The Health Check shows you where the money went. The build fixes why it went there. At every company I've worked for, I built the processes and the tools behind buying and planning — and that's what I build for you: one loop your team runs every season, with the tool for each step.
Each step gets a process and a tool
- Open-to-buy — the financial plan every buy answers to
- Seasonal & carryover buys — sized by sell-through, exit planned up front
- Core reorder process — best sellers stay in stock without overbuying
- Allocation — right depth, right channels, fast
- Markdown strategy — enough, on the right styles, at the right time
- Consolidation — broken styles pulled back into full size runs
- Reporting — the weekly view that makes every call visible
Plus size curves and carryover productivity reviews.
The Planning Build
I build all of it with your team: the tools, the calendar, the weekly routine. A system your team owns, not a dependency.
Fractional Chief Merchant
I run it with you week to week. One call where you make chase, reorder, and markdown decisions in minutes.
To be clear on price: the $8,500 Health Check is a complete, standalone engagement. Neither of these is bundled into it, and neither is quoted until after you've seen my work and decided you want more. Full detail →
Who this is for.
A fit if
- You're a founder-led brand doing roughly $2M–$50M
- You carry inventory, and it's your biggest use of cash
- You sell a repeatable core alongside seasonal product
- Nobody on the team owns an open-to-buy
- You still approve the buys yourself
Not a fit if
- You already have a planning team running an open-to-buy
- You're pre-revenue or still placing a first production run
- You're made-to-order or dropship, with no inventory risk
- You want someone to run an app, not rebuild the function
Fair questions.
I already have a buyer. Isn't this their job?
A buyer owns the product — the taste, the vendors, the line. A planner owns the system around it, from the financial plan to the season's exit. They're different jobs, and most founder-led brands only ever hired the first one. Your buyer usually becomes my closest ally, because they finally get the numbers they've been asking for.
We'll hire a planner eventually.
Good — and the Build is what makes that hire work. Here's the trap nobody warns founders about: the planner who can build a function from nothing is a senior one, and they cost far more than the budget you have in mind. A planner with three or four years of experience can run a system beautifully, but they've only ever inherited one. They've never had to decide what an open-to-buy should look like for a business like yours, or how deep to buy when the answer isn't in last year's numbers. Hire that person into a blank spreadsheet and they'll struggle — and it won't be their fault. I know, because I was that person. Build the function first and your next hire inherits a job they can actually do, at a salary you can actually pay.
Can't my Shopify apps do this?
Apps report; they don't decide. An app will tell you a style sold twelve units last week. It won't tell you whether that means chase it hard, or that you bought too deep and the curve is about to fall off a cliff. That call comes from having watched thousands of styles do both. The eighteen years of pattern recognition is the product — the app is just the input.
What if you don't find anything?
Then you don't pay. That's what the guarantee is for — and it's why we start with a call, so I can turn down the engagements where I don't think I'd earn it.
Is the Planning Build included in the $8,500?
No. The Health Check is a complete, fixed-fee engagement that ends with a plan you can run yourself. The Planning Build and the fractional retainer are separate engagements, quoted separately, and only after you've seen my work. Nothing is bundled, and there's no obligation on either side.
Our data is a mess.
It always is. Three exports from Shopify or your ERP is the starting point, and making sense of them is part of what you're paying for. I've never received a file I couldn't work with.
The merchandising calendar doesn't wait for you to feel ready.
Spring commitments go to vendors this fall. Whatever discipline is in place before that purchase order is signed is the discipline that buy gets.
A Health Check takes three weeks. Count backward from your next buy date, and "eventually" has a deadline.
Find out what your inventory is hiding — before you buy more of it.
Book a 30-minute call. We'll look at where your inventory stands and whether a Health Check makes sense. Worst case, you leave with a checklist your team can run without me.
Book a call