Huckberry

The challenge: Forecasting across 100,000+ SKUs to make sure money wasn't left on the table

Inventory planning is a high-stakes balancing act: Buy too little, and you miss sales. Buy too much, and you tie up profit in products that sit. At Huckberry — a fast-moving lifestyle brand with over 100,000 SKUs — getting that balance right is critical.

To plan and monitor inventory, the planning team used a sprawl of spreadsheets to conduct their huge pre-season planning process using strings of calculations. Within these spreadsheets, they also investigated any causes of any product spikes or declines.

But Huckberry can bring in as many as 200 new products within 30 days; in high-velocity moments like these, the manual process of updating their spreadsheets, which housed tons of calculations, was slowing down action on how to respond to product fluctuations and becoming more prone to human error.

Ben Saxe, the Director of Data and Analytics, saw big opportunities for Hex to ease the planning team’s process with automation and introduce more accuracy on their complex forecasting models. “The hardest thing for our team is to plan when an uncertainty gets introduced. So the more that we can get ahead with data-driven forecasting, the more it de-risks our inventory decisions, especially with markdowns.”

The solution: Data apps that provided more accurate forecasting and less manual work than spreadsheets

Instead of spending months implementing a costly and rigid BI solution, the team used Hex to build a real-time inventory forecasting app in weeks that has resulted in 20x more accuracy in forecasting than their previous spreadsheet system.

With the data apps in Hex, the planning team now has weeks of visibility into inventory performance, recommendations on any markdowns, and on replenishments, eliminating hours of manual spreadsheet updates.

New product forecasts, which were once a major blind spot, are now much more accurate thanks to the ability to remove seasonality curves. “If the teams don’t have historical performance to reference because a product is new, they can now borrow the seasonality curve from similar products,” Saxe said. “And if they want to normalize demand, they can swap out holidays to ensure they’re not overstocking when holiday demand falls.”

Saxe’s team explored off-the-shelf forecasting solutions but found them expensive and overly rigid. Hex's flexibility paid off. “We needed something flexible enough to fit the nuances of our business. Typically, when you apply a filter on a BI dashboard, it has to apply to the entire dashboard or to an entire cell,” Saxe said. “To only impact one cell or one field in a cell is extremely difficult. Hex takes this to the nth degree.”

The data apps also shortened the feedback loop between business users and the data team. Business users can interact directly with the models, adjusting assumptions without pinging the data team for every what-if. “What's so incredible about Hex is that if business users know something we don't know, they can actually adjust it themselves,” Saxe said. “You're not just filling in fields — you're interacting with the model.” “We're no longer building dashboards,” Saxe said. “We're building applications and delivering insights at a moment's notice inside of Hex.”

Impact: Over $1M saved, faster feedback loops, and a stronger partnership with stakeholders

In just a few weeks, the team delivered a working forecasting application that fundamentally changed how planning and marketing operated. With it, teams can now:

• - Forecast confidently down to the SKU, across 100,000+ variants

• - Run live scenario modeling before committing to buys

• - Optimize size and color mix to maximize sell-through

• - See and shape the financial impact of their decisions

The payoff? More than $1 million saved through a sharper core replenishment model and leaner inventory footprint.

"It really pays off in dividends to accurately forecast some of our big product campaigns," Ben said. "We reviewed this with the CFO and he is advertising this to the rest of the company as 'a million-dollar product.'"

Furthermore, the company strengthened its relationships with suppliers, thanks to more precise forecasts. With better projections, they no longer needed to continuously renegotiate numbers throughout the season, ensuring smoother communication and fewer adjustments. ”Signing on to Hex has been a game changer for us here.” Ben said.